Photo: Natalia Gubernatorova
Russian citizen Dmitry Popov , arrested in Belarus in 2020, asked President Vladimir Putin to revoke citizenship. According to Dozhda, he made such a request in a letter to his sister due to insufficient help from Moscow.
“I have been waiting for more than a year for Russia not to leave its own people,” Popov wrote. – As Putin has repeatedly said. & # 39; & # 39;
According to the arrested man, the Russian consul visited him only once a year and said, “ Dima, you understand everything! & # 39; & # 39; Popov added that he did not want to have a passport from a country “which is ready to sacrifice its citizens in the interests of another country”.
In Belarus, Popov was the moderator of the public website of Sergei Tikhanovsky, a politician who was about to run for president. Even before the start of mass protests in Minsk and other cities, Popov was detained in a case of “ an attempt to interfere in foreign elections.“ “ The Male State“. This community was known in the Russian Federation for harassment and threats by representatives of the LGBT community, which was spread by many participants. During FIFA's 2018 FIFA World Cup, Russians began complaining about threats and insults and reports of impending retaliation by some members of the public for their confidential relationship with foreign fans. Members of the “male state” also threatened girls who appeared in one of Rammstein's leader Till Lindemann's videos.
The founder of the “ male state“, Vladislav Pozdnyakov, was sentenced by a court in Nizhny Novgorod at the end of 2018 to two years probation for inciting hatred against women. In March 2019, the sentence was abolished due to the partial decriminalization of Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. In 2020, Pozdnyakov pretended to be murdered in Turkey.