ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- A Russian rights activist from St. Petersburg has been briefly detained and charged with holding an illegal public event after he publicly questioned officials about the fate of jailed opposition activist Andrei Pivovarov, whose whereabouts has been unknown since mid-January.
Dmitry Negodin told RFE/RL on February 15 that he unfolded a poster reading "Where is Andrei Pivovarov?" the previous evening in downtown St. Petersburg before being detained by police.
Negodin said he was released after being officially charged for the offense that could cost him a 40,000-ruble ($540) fine.
Pivovarov, the former executive director of the now-defunct pro-democracy Open Russia movement, was detained in May 2021 after being taken off a Warsaw-bound plane just before takeoff from St. Petersburg and sentenced to four years in prison in July 2022 on a charge of heading an "undesirable organization."
The "undesirable organizations" law, adopted in 2015, has repeatedly been used by Russian authorities to target critical voices.
Pivovarov, who has called the case against him politically motivated, was transferred from a detention center in the southwestern Krasnodar region in late December, and his last communication with his relatives was on January 18 while he was in a transit prison.
It remains unknown where exactly Pivovarov is now and where he will be serving his sentence.
The process of transferring convicts in Russia and many other former Soviet republics, known as "etap," involves trains specifically designed for prisoners. The transfers can take days, weeks, or even months as the convicts stop and spend some time in transit prisons.
Prisoners who travel in such trains are crowded into caged compartments with little fresh air, no showers, and only limited access to food or a toilet.
The "undesirable organizations" law was part of a series of regulations pushed by the Kremlin that squeezed many nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations that received funding from foreign sources -- mainly from Europe and the United States.
The Russian State Duma has since dramatically widened the scope of the law, including to bar Russian nationals and organizations anywhere in the world from taking part in activities of such "undesirable" groups.