The man who escaped house arrest in Russia after coming to authorities’ attention because his daughter drew an anti-war picture at school, has been detained in Belarus, according to a media report.
Alexei Moskalyov, who was on Tuesday sentenced to two years in a penal colony after being found guilty of discrediting the Russian army on social media, went on the run and failed to appear before the court in the town of Yefremov in Russia’s Tula region, south of Moscow.
In a post on Telegram referring to the report that his client had been detained in Minsk, Moskalyov’s lawyer Dmitry Zakhvatov said: “I currently have no contact with Alexei. He isn’t answering his phone. I can’t confirm for sure, but according to indirect data,” the details of the report were correct.
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has aligned himself with neighboring Russia in its invasion of Ukraine — payback after President Vladimir Putin helped prop up Lukashenko’s regime when mass protests broke out in response to a 2020 election widely considered to have been a sham.
Moskalyov’s case has caught public attention, particularly as concern has grown for his 13-year-old daughter, who was placed in state care. She remains in what the authorities call “a social rehabilitation center” and has been denied any communication with the outside world.
The court formally sentenced Moskalyov over comments he made on social media, in which he called Russian soldiers “rapists” and the country’s leaders “terrorists.” But his defense team and rights activists argue he was actually punished over his daughter’s picture, drawn in April last year, which showed a woman and child standing next to a flag that read “Glory to Ukraine” and in the path of rockets coming from the direction of a Russian flag, labeled: “No to war.”
The case has been likened to the Stalinist practice of targeting the children of “enemies of the state.”
