On March 2, 2021 in Brest, a number of activists and young people, who were probably on the list of Main Department for Combating Organized Crime as politically unreliable, were detained. During the week Aleksandr Kozlyanko, Andrey Marach, Pavel Shpetny, Nikita Dranets, Daniil Chul’, Aleksey Golovko were detained.

Each of the detainees was charged with gross violation of order (Art. 342) and participation in an international criminal organisation (Art. 285.2).

It later became clear that the activists Akikhiro Gaevsky-Khanada, Andrey Chepyuk and Aleksandr Frantskevich, detained back in August-September 2020, and human rights activist Marfa Rabkova were also charged with the same case.

By the beginning of the trial the majority of the detained were charged under three-dozen articles of the Criminal Code. The grounds for the charges were the anarchists’ actions against the battery factory (blocking the Brest-Minsk highway), the participation of anarchists in the march of Non-sclackers in Brest in 2017 and graffiti. Interestingly, at one time the march of Non-slackers was qualified as a mass event and some anarchists received an administrative arrest for it. For some reason, 4 years later, they decided to initiate a criminal case.

Aleksandr was sentenced to 6 years.

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