A Moscow court has frozen bank accounts with 6 million rubles ($64,400) belonging to Erika Chkhartishvili, the wife of prominent Russian writer Boris Akunin, which is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili.
The Basmanny district court ruled on February 27 that the cash in Erika Chkhartishvili's accounts "was jointly earned by the couple and used to commit crimes."
In early February, the same court issued an arrest warrant for Akunin on charges of calling for terrorism and disseminating "false information" about the Russian Army.
Last month, Russia's Interior Ministry put Akunin on an international wanted list for alleged criminal activity, although specific charges against him were not listed.
Akunin, 67, who currently lives in London after leaving Russia in 2014 following Moscow's illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, has openly criticized Moscow's unprovoked invasion of its western neighbor.
Earlier this month, the Russian Justice Ministry declared Akunin a "foreign agent," along with several other additions to the punitive list broadly applied to target regime critics.
Last month, Russia's financial watchdog, Rosfinmonitoring, added Akunin to its list of terrorists and extremists without any explanation, but media reports said an investigation into charges of discrediting Russian armed forces had been launched against the writer.
That move came less than a week after one of Russia's largest book publishers and the country's biggest bookstore chain announced that they had dropped Akunin and another popular writer, Dmitry Bykov, over their pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian comments.
In October, all Russian theaters staging plays based on Akunin's works removed his name from posters.
Akunin was among dozens of Russian writers who openly condemned Moscow's aggression against Ukraine. On February 24, 2022, immediately after the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion, he wrote on Facebook that "a new horrible epoch had started" in Russia.
"Until the last moment I could not believe that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would launch this absurd war and I was wrong. I have always believed that in the end, common sense will win, and I was wrong. Madness won," Akunin wrote.