CHELYABINSK. Sept 10 (Interfax) - The Central District Court of Chelyabinsk has sentenced two anarchists, Dmitry Tsybukovsky and his wife Anastasia Safonova, to two and a half and two years, respectively, in a general-security penitentiary for a protest outside the regional office of the Federal Security Service (FSB), their lawyers told Interfax.
"The court has just sentenced Dmitry Tsybukovsky to two years and six months and his wife, Anastasia Safonova, to two years in a penal colony," Andrei and Olga Lepekhin, lawyers with the Agora international human rights group, told Interfax on Friday.
The defendants were found guilty of hooliganism motivated by political hatred and enmity, the lawyers said.
According to the summary of the case, in 2018, Tsybukovsky and Safonova organized a demonstration outside the regional office of the FSB to express support for the defendants in the so-called Set (Network) case of the organization deemed terrorist in Russia by putting a banner on the fence and throwing a flare into the snow. Investigators viewed the latter as the use of weapons.
At the same time, the court exempted the defendants from serving a sentence for vandalism due to the expiration of the statute of limitations on this count. The married couple was charged with vandalism for drawing pictures opposing retirement age reform on a transformer box and a shed.
The sentence will be appealed at an appellate court, the lawyers said.