After calls for protests against a lockdown in the corona pandemic, a Russian court sentenced an opera singer to ten years in a prison camp for extremism.
According to the judgment of the court in Rostov-on-Don announced on Tuesday, Vadim Cheldiyev, who was born in 1981, had called for demonstrations in the republic of North Ossetia in the North Caucasus more than two years ago to call for a reversal of “self-isolation” in the corona pandemic. As the lawyer Pavel Chikov reported in his blog on the Telegram news channel, two “co-organizers” of the protests were also sentenced to eight and eight and a half years in camps.
At the rallies in the North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz, calls for the resignation of the government and for new elections were also raised. Clashes broke out as uniformed men attempted to disperse the protests. There were more than 100 arrests during the April 2020 campaign.
Cheldiyev and the two other convicts were now punished as organizers. Initial allegations of hooliganism against the singer had been turned into charges of extremist activity and organizing mass riots.
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