Watchdog

City authorities in St. Petersburg have ruled that plaques commemorating victims of Soviet persecutions are "inexpedient" and “illegal” and should be removed from the streets.

The City Committee for Development and Architecture announced its ruling in an official letter that was posted on December 6 on the Facebook account of Andrei Pivovarov, the chairman of the Open Russia civic movement.

The letter is addressed to an aide of lawmaker Vitaly Milonov, Aleksandr Mokhnatkin, who had questioned the legality of the plaques, calling them "illegal ads."

The committee wrote in its letter that it had instructed St. Petersburg's district authorities to consider the plaques illegal and to remove them.

Activists of the Last Address project, launched in 2014, place memorial plaques with names of the victims of the Great Purge launched by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s on the houses where they lived before their arrests.

About 800 such plaques have been placed in dozens of cities in Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, and the Czech Republic.

SIMFEROPOL -- Russia-imposed authorities in Crimea have detained a prominent lawyer, Emil Kurbedinov, his colleagues say.

Attorney Lilya Hemedzhi told RFE/RL that officers from the Russian Anti-Extremism Center detained Kurbedinov on December 6 in Simferopol in a case linked to a social media post made before Russian forces seized Crimea from Ukraine and annexed the peninsula.

Hemedzhi said Kurbedinov is accused of writing a Facebook post in 2013 that, according to investigators, carried "elements of extremism."

Russian lawyer Nikolai Polozov said Kuberdinov’s detainment was another case of "pressure on lawyers involved in political cases in Crimea."

Polozov also noted in a December 6 statement posted on Facebook that Kurbedinov is currently representing some of the 24 Ukrainian sailors seized by Russian special forces on November 25 along with three Ukrainian navy ships off the coast of Crimea.

"I call on the lawyers’ community, public organizations, and representatives of international organizations to immediately react to another gross violation of lawyers' rights," Polozov wrote.

Other clients of Kurbedinov in recent years have included defendants in Crimea charged in high-profile cases that human rights organizations and Western governments say are politically motivated.

Since Russia seized and illegally annexed the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014, Moscow has conducted a persistent campaign of oppression that targets Crimeans who oppose the annexation.