Yuri Khovansky

The court ended the criminal case against blogger Yuri Khovansky* because the statute of limitations had expired. He was accused of justifying terrorism for a song about the terrorist attack on the musical “Nord-Ost” in 2002. The song was posted on YouTube in 2020 not by Khovansky himself, but by another blogger. Khovansky performed the song back on stream in 2012.

Khovansky was born on June 9, 2021 in St. He was detained in his own apartment in St. Petersburg. After that, the blogger was placed in a pre-trial detention center, where she remained until December of the same year (after the preventive measure was changed, for example, to a number of restrictions on freedom, she was not allowed to use the Internet, comment on the media and leave the house between 22 and 10 hours).

– St. Says the official statement of the joint press service of the St. Petersburg courts.

Yuri Khovansky

While still in pre-trial detention, Khovansky wrote an open letter in which he acknowledged that “his action was not morally justified”. In the same place, he noted that the statute of limitations in his case had already expired and the article on his responsibility to justify terrorism was published in 2016 itself. The Khovansky case caused a wide public backlash, and some celebrities, including Ksenia Sobchak, spoke out in her defense.

*Included in the registry of individuals with information about involvement in terrorism or extremism by Rosfinmonitoring.