One of the organizers of Scarlet Swan, Sofiya Chepik, has left Russia. She said...

One of the organizers of Scarlet Swan, Sofiya Chepik, has left Russia. She spoke about threats from FSB officers

20-year-old Sofiya Chepik told journalists that she had left the country:

“I feel better than ever. I feel safe, and for the first time in a long while I feel so good and calm inside. I’m not scared, not anxious.”

According to the young woman, she had started thinking about leaving a month ago, but on April 20 she was arrested for 15 days under the article on petty hooliganism. The ruling said that she had “used foul language in public places” and “harassed” citizens in an offensive manner.

▶️ FSB operational video and threats

A few days after Chepik’s arrest, the FSB reported detentions in a case about preparations for assassination attempts on Roskomnadzor employees. One of the defendants was killed during detention.

The FSB published a video in which young people say they were planning attacks. Chepik was one of the participants in the video, although she was not detained in the criminal case. On camera, she said that she had administered a chat where officials’ personal data was published.

After being released from the special detention center, Chepik said that FSB officers forced her to appear in this video:

“What I said in the video was all a memorized script that I was told to say on video. I didn’t even know what I was talking about. They said it would supposedly help me. I was under so much stress that I couldn’t say that I wouldn’t do it without a lawyer.”

Security officers came to the young woman’s home with a search warrant. It said that a certain Prokopyev R.R. was storing weapons there.

“There were threats that there could be a criminal case. They read me news reports about terrorism, and I had no idea what it was about. When I came to the FSB office on Lubyanka and asked what terrorism they were talking about, they all just shrugged and said, ‘we don’t know.’ [About the other detainees] they told me that one had been neutralized,” Chepik added.

▶️ What Scarlet Swan is

“Scarlet Swan” is a Telegram chat and anonymous movement that called for protests against online blocking. In particular, an action on March 29 was announced there. Several days before that, members of the community began to be detained. Two of them left Russia on the eve of the planned protests.

🔗 We wrote about what the protests against the large-scale internet shutdowns were like, here.

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Sofiya Chepik / Photo: social media