One of the organizers of the Scarlet Swan movement, Sofia Chepik, has left Russia

One of the organizers of the Scarlet Swan movement, Sofia Chepik, has left Russia

One of the organizers of the Scarlet Swan movement, 20-year-old activist Sofia Chepik, has left Russia. She told Verstka this.

“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,” Chepik said.

She added that at one of the borders she was questioned longer than the others, but overall her departure went smoothly.

According to Chepik, she began thinking about leaving back in early April. However, on April 20 a court in Moscow jailed her for 15 days for “disturbing public order”; the ruling said that she had “used obscene language in public places” and “insultingly harassed” citizens.

After that, on April 24, the FSB reported that it had prevented a “terrorist act targeting the leadership of Roskomnadzor.” According to the security service’s press release, seven people were detained in Moscow, Ufa, Novosibirsk, and Yaroslavl, while another young man born in 2004, who had “led the group,” was killed during the arrest. The press release was accompanied by a video purportedly from operational filming, and the human rights project First Department suggested, based on the voice, that Chepik was in it.

The girl was released on May 3 after her arrest and confirmed that she had been filmed for the FSB video. According to Chepik, she was forced to say the text under threats and “did not know what it was about.”

🟦The Scarlet Swan movement became popular thanks to TikTok. Starting on March 13–14, videos appeared there calling for people to come out on March 29 to rallies for a free internet in various cities, in particular in Moscow at Bolotnaya Square. Against this backdrop, a channel and chat emerged, and the organizers and moderators were young people aged 14 to 20, Verstka wrote.

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