North Ossetian police have detained Mozdok resident Yulia Melnichenko, who held a solo picket outside the North Ossetian Prosecutor General’s Office demanding an end to what she described as repressions against her family. A few minutes after the protest began, she was taken to the Iriston district police station.
The picket took place on Thursday morning, according to the Russian independent media outlet Caucasian Knot. Melnichenko stood outside the Prosecutor General’s Office holding a sign that read: ‘The prosecutor's office must protect citizens’ rights, not violate them. Stop the repressions’.
According to Melnichenko, the protest was a response to years of pressure on her family from local authorities and law enforcement agencies. She told Caucasian Knot that she was protesting ‘against beatings, the unlawful seizure of our land plot without court proceedings, and the fabrication of administrative and criminal cases against members of our family’.
About 15 minutes after the protest began, a security guard from the Prosecutor General’s Office approached her, photographed her sign, and asked for her name.
‘He said he had called the police to take me away from the prosecutor's office. Five armed officers of the National Guard arrived and said they had been called by the prosecutor's office. Then four more police officers came. I asked if they were not ashamed to detain me in such numbers given that I am 155 centimetres tall and weigh 46 kilogrammes. They said they felt awkward, but had to obey the order from the prosecutor’s office’, she said.
According to Melnichenko, an administrative protocol was drawn up against her on charges of ‘failure to comply with the rules of conduct during an emergency or threat of its occurrence’. The police cited a decree North Ossetian Head Sergei Menyailo banning public mass events, issued on 27 July, although that decree does not apply to solo pickets.
The processing of the protocol took around three hours.
‘Although they brought me to court for this, we were told there that the judge was in the deliberation room and did not come out’, Melnichenko said.
She was later released and has not yet been given a date for her hearing.
Melnichenko explained that during the picket she was demanding that a local prosecutor from North Ossetia personally review her complaints against the head of one of the departments of the Prosecutor General’s Office, as her complaints had previously been forwarded to the same official she was complaining about.
According to Melnichenko, the harassment of her family began in 2019, after her brother Rostislav was beaten by a police officer. She said the officer attacked him near their home, accusing him and a friend of blocking his car.
Lawyer Andrei Sabinin, who represented the family, previously noted that investigators repeatedly refused to open a criminal case despite medical evidence of injuries. According to him, over several years the Melnichenko family received at least five refusals from the Investigative Committee.
Later, Melnichenko said, the Mozdok district prosecutor’s office demanded that her aunt be stripped of a plot of land granted in 2021 for lifetime use to build a house.
Melnichenko has previously staged solo protests. On 11 September, she held a picket outside the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office in Moscow with the same demand — to stop repressions against her family. She was then held in police custody for over three hours. Later, she said, an FSB officer from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) summoned her for a conversation and informed her that no action would be taken on her complaints.
Melnichenko has linked the pressure on her family to their Ukrainian heritage. She claims that back in 2019, during her first interrogation, an investigator asked her about her nationality.
Elizaveta Chukharova
