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28-year-old Ksenia Garina, a resident of Irkutsk region in eastern Siberia, was detained yesterday as she was leaving Pretrial Detention Centre No. 5 in Yekaterinburg, the Siberian Express reports, citing human rights defender Pyotr Kuryanov.

She has been accused of financing extremist activity (Part 1, Article 282.3 of the Criminal Code) over six transfers in the amount of 993 rubles (about US$10) to Roman Rugevich, the founder of the AntiPytki project. Garina said she was transferring the money to cover the costs of sending letters to her husband in prison.

According to the Siberian Express, these funds were sent in autumn 2022, when Rugevich had not yet been placed on the Rosfinmonitoring “terrorists and extremists” list (his name only appeared there in December 2024). Investigators consider AntiPytki an extremist group, but the courts have not issued a ruling recognising the project as extremist.

Today, the Leninsky District Court in Yekaterinburg remanded Garina in custody on a new charge, a source familiar with the case informed OVD-Info.

She had already spent a year in detention in the AntiPytki case. In order to extend her remand beyond a year, the investigation would have had to apply not to the district court but to the regional court, and to justify the extension there. However, the investigator did not do this, and on 9 December Garina was released from the pretrial detention centre.

Garina and five others were detained in the AntiPytki case in autumn 2024. In spring, a seventh suspect was detained in Novosibirsk region, western Siberia. They were accused of recruiting members for an extremist community (Part 1.1, Article 282.1 of the Criminal Code), and the last person detained was also charged with participating in the community (Part 2, Article 282.1 of the Criminal Code).

The project’s founder, Roman Rugevich, who is currently abroad, is accused of organising it (Part 1, Article 282.1 of the Criminal Code). He insists that all those detained in Russia were merely subscribers to the project’s Telegram channel, not participants in the project itself.

In June, Garina was also charged with inciting the disruption of penal colony operations (Part 3, Article 321 of the Criminal Code, combined with Part 4, Article 33) and with two counts of battery (Article 116, combined with Part 4, Article 33). Security forces claim that through posts on the project’s social media, she incited three prisoners to attack “activists”—inmates who cooperated with the administrations of penal colonies or detention centres. The posts that led to the charges listed the “activists’” nicknames, stories of their cooperation with prison staff, regions, and a call for victims to report cases of violence. There were no calls for attacks in these posts.

Garina does not admit guilt and insists she was simply helping prisoners correct spelling mistakes in their complaints.

“In fact, we were asking the Investigative Committee for help; there was no call for any violence. Violence breeds violence—if we respond to every torturer with another torturer, what kind of country will we have? We simply called on the Investigative Committee to hold torturers legally accountable,” she said about the posts with “activist” data.

Garina has a five-year-old son. “I want to live a normal life, I want to return to my work, continue my studies, I want my family to be with me: I just want to be a mother, a wife, and with my child,” she told the judge during another detention extension hearing six months ago.

  • The AntiPytki project, also called Anti Pytki, was founded by Rugevich in February 2021 in cooperation with Vladimir Osechkin, founder of Gulagu.net. The project reports on cases of torture in Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) institutions and publishes personal data of prisoners who, according to the project, cooperated with the administration and used violence against other convicts. Rugevich left Russia due to fears of persecution and was granted refugee status in France in 2023.