Police in Saint Petersburg have threatened to open an extremism case against Lena Patyaeva, the friend of missing Chechen woman Seda Suleymanova. Officers claim that Patyaeva’s poster, which she recently protested with, could contain ‘signs of extremism’.
Patyaeva was detained on 25 November 40 minutes into her picket outside Police Station No. 54 in Saint Petersburg. Her sign read: ‘You handed her over to death. Live with it’. She held her picket outside the same police station where Suleymanova was believed to have been taken two years earlier before being handed over to relatives and returned to Chechnya.
Following her detention, she was taken to Police Station No. 42. She says that officers there told her the wording on her poster ‘may contain signs of extremism’. Patyaeva called the accusation ‘absurd’, stating that ‘there is nothing extremist about urging people to recognise what they have done’. She said she considers it her duty to push for a proper investigation into Suleymanova’s disappearance, including the accountability of officers from Police Station No. 54 ‘who so easily handed her over to death’.
‘If you have chosen the profession of “law enforcement officer”, you must prevent crimes, not contribute to them. If you had simply detained Seda in the station for a few extra hours under any pretext and returned her boyfriend’s phone so that he could call a lawyer, she would still be alive. She was 26, she loved dogs and cats, she dreamed of becoming an artist, she planned to marry Stas and have children — all of this could have happened, but it did not. Live with it’, Patyaeva wrote on her Telegram channel, Where Is Seda?.
On 27 November, Saint Petersburg’s Krasnoselsky District Court ruled that Patyaeva’s picket constituted a repeated violation of public-assembly regulations and sentenced her to 10 days in prison. The poster was seized and is to be destroyed.
While already in custody, Patyaeva wrote: ‘I do not regret anything, and nothing has changed for me’.
Suleymanova fled Chechnya in 2022, stating that she did not want to enter a forced marriage. She lived and worked in Saint Petersburg where, in August 2023, she was detained by police on suspicion of theft following a complaint filed by her mother. She was then handed over to relatives, after which her whereabouts became unknown. In April 2024, a criminal case was officially opened into her disappearance and possible killing.
Over the past year, Patyaeva has repeatedly held solo pickets — in Saint Petersburg on Akhmat Kadyrov Bridge, and also in Grozny — demanding an investigation into Suleymanova’s fate. Following one of these actions, in April 2025, a court sentenced her to 20 hours of community service.
Elizaveta Chukharova
