On June 1, the Leninsky District Court of Yekaterinburg imposed a fine of 300,000 rubles ($3,712) on the Urals branch of Memorial for discrediting the army. The organization was penalized for its website publications regarding the outcomes of the war in Ukraine over the past year. The details were reported by the It's My City publication.
The Orenburg Cossack Troops have called for the prosecution of the local branch of Memorial and its leader, Alexei Mosin, for their website publications. The cossacks were upset over the materials with bird imagery on a black background and texts discussing the Russian army's operations in Ukraine over the past year.
Following a complaint in April 2023, law enforcement officers visited Mosin and escorted him to the Yeltsin Center warehouse in Yekaterinburg to retrieve the founding documents of Memorial's legal entities. Subsequently, he was taken to a police station where a report was filed with the charges of discrediting the army.
Mosin, the head of the organization, stated that he was accused as the person in charge of the website, despite having no access to it in reality.
Since the closure in Russia of the International Memorial and Memorial’s Human Rights Center, security services and courts have intensified their pressure on the organization's regional branches. The Urals branch was initially subjected to fines, followed by the opening of a criminal case involving an alleged attempt to illegally transport cultural treasures, specifically the Memorial archives in Perm, out of the country. On May 19, searches were conducted involving at least nine individuals. As per the FSB's request, the head of the Perm Historical Memory Center, Alexander Chernyshov, was placed under arrest until July 11 by court order.
