Yury Khovansky has been held in the pre-trial detention center since June 10, 2021, threatened with up to seven years in prison.
“The Court has terminated the criminal proceedings against Khovansky because the statute of limitations for criminal liability has expired,” said the Joint Press Service of the St. Petersburg Courts in a statement.
Also information about the termination of the socialbites.ca criminal case approved Alexander Peredruk, Khovansky’s lawyer.
“The court decision was taken at the request of the defense and we are fully satisfied. The end of the criminal prosecution of Yuri Khovansky is also the basis for his removal from the List of extremists and terrorists.” Peredruk told socialbites.ca.
Khovansky was detained in July 2020 after a woman and a man contacted the police, who found two songs online that were posted on a YouTube channel with 25 subscribers. In the song, the blogger mocks the terrorists who participated in the 2002 terror attack at the musical Nord Ost in Moscow, and expresses his joy at the death of the people in the theater, according to researchers. On the videotape of the detention, Khovansky admitted his guilt. The investigation considered that he sang the song to “form the ideology of terrorism, the belief in its appeal.”
The results of the review said that the song contains overt calls for terrorist activities, overt justification of terrorism and its propaganda, signs of threats and humiliation on the basis of nationality, and calls and justifications for the need to engage in aggressive actions. , violent, cruel acts (acts of terrorism). At the same time, the video was released in July 2020, the blogger’s defense claimed that Khovansky performed this song in 2012, and the second part of Article 205 in its current form appeared in the Criminal Code only in 2016.
On June 10, 2021, St. Petersburg Dzerzhinsky District Court chose detention as a preventive measure. Khovansky was threatened with a fine of 500 thousand rubles. or five to seven years in prison.
The court repeatedly considered the blogger’s complaints and pleas, but extended the period of his detention. On August 10, 2021, Khovansky was included in the list of terrorists and extremists.
Famous artists drew attention to the case. On October 6, 2021, the trial took place again, during which acquaintances of the accused Oxxxymiron, Ilya Maddison and Restaurateur gathered near the courthouse (Khovansky says in his letters that he expected support from Morgenstern (known as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation) and Yuri Dudya (in the Russian Federation) recognized as foreign agent), but they refused).
On November 3, 2021, Khovansky gave a speech in court and requested that he be allowed to go home to celebrate the New Year with his family, but the court extended his detention until January 8, 2022. On December 21, 2021, it became known that Khovansky appealed his criminal prosecution to the European Court of Human Rights.
On December 21, the court softened the blogger’s preventive measure from the pre-trial detention center to ban certain actions. He was prohibited from using the phone and the internet, communicating with friends and the press, leaving the house between 18:00 and 10:00, and coming within 300 meters of the apartment where a video with a song was recorded, according to investigators. The blogger left the courtroom with her family. The court extended the ban on certain actions for Khovansky twice, but on April 7, 2022, he was allowed to use the Internet. Then Vasily Vlasov, deputy of the State Duma, a member of the Liberal Democratic Party, said that the case against the blogger will be dismissed due to the statute of limitations.
“I am a witness as a reference at a trial. I do not communicate with Yuri in this regard, because the court does not allow it. Witnesses in the case cannot communicate with the suspect. Now we await the trial itself. I think once the statute of limitations expires, the case will end and I can talk to Yuri,” he said.