The Kremlin complained that political scientist Alexander Kynev was detained without approval from the presidential administration

The Kremlin complained that political scientist Alexander Kynev was detained without approval from the presidential administration

The detention of political scientist Alexander Kynev in a drug distribution case involved FSB officers and came as a “complete surprise” to the domestic politics bloc of the presidential administration, four sources close to the Kremlin told Verstka.

According to one of them, several attempts to find out at least the reasons for the detention produced no substantive result. The only thing they managed to learn was that “the court [on pretrial detention] has already taken place, the investigation will not roll anything back,” the source says.

Another Verstka source stressed several times that he learned about Kynev’s detention from the news, just like his colleagues. “I was fucking stunned myself. The fact that they detained him after the elections, well, that was their [the FSB’s] thinking,” the source says.

According to him, Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy head of the presidential administration, “did not know himself” about the prosecution of Kynev. Verstka was unable to additionally confirm this.

“Drugs, not ‘discrediting’ [the army, a common political charge], so there would be no talk that the case is political,” this is how one of Verstka’s sources explained the possible logic of the case against Kynev.

He doubts that the political scientist could have used drugs: Kynev, the source says, is a “well-known healthy-lifestyle guy,” drank almost nothing, played a lot of sports, and was practically always at the gym.

The leadership of New People, with which Kynev unofficially cooperates, also did not know about the impending detention, a source in the party told Verstka. An elections expert close to the presidential administration expressed the view that the detention was supposed to demonstrate that “cooperation with a foreign agent is unacceptable for a parliamentary party.”

The major outlets Mash and Shot, which cooperate with the presidential administration and usually report quickly on high-profile criminal cases, wrote nothing about Kynev’s detention. Baza limited itself to a short news item with no additional details.

💜On September 25, a court sent Alexander Kynev to a pretrial detention center in a case on the illegal production, sale, or transfer of drugs on a large scale. This article provides for 10 to 20 years in prison.

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