Yegor Zhukov
1 September 2020.
The 22-year-old Yegor Zhukov was badly beaten by two thugs near his home. The thugs who attacked him disappeared on scooters. Zhukov’s team posted a picture of his face covered in bruises and gashes on Telegram and Facebook.
He participated in a protest march in July 2019 and was arrested along with some 1000 others. A Russian court later found him guilty of inciting extremism on his YouTube channel and was given a three-year suspended jail term. He was also banned him from using the Internet for two years.
Yegor Zhukov
Hours before the attack, he said on his YouTube channel that he had been rejected for a master’s course on cinema at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, after initially being accepted for it. He linked that rejection to this political activity.
The attack on Zhukov happened just 10 days after Navalny fell ill after boarding a plane in Siberia. Navalny’s supporters say that he was poisoned in Tomsk where he boarded the plane. He is now being treated in Berlin. The German hospital said on Friday that there was ‘some improvement’ in Navalny’s condition but the 44-year-old remains in a medically induced coma and on a ventilator. Tests by German hospital indicated poisoning by cholinesterase inhibitors, which are found in nerve agents.
Elsewhere, Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer for Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation said bailiffs had seized $460,000 from her bank accounts today (1 September 2020), leaving her deeply in the red. It comes nearly a year after a court ordered damages of $1.2 million from her and Navalny in a case surrounding a company called Konkord that provided school meals in Moscow. The case concerned an investigation by the Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation into a company that provides school meals, alleging that it was monopolizing the market and serving poor quality food that made children ill. The school meals program was linked to businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Putin. Prigozhin has vowed to ruin Russian leader Alexei Navalny and his associates. Navalny in July formally closed the foundation in a move to avoid paying its share of the court-ordered penalty.
BBC reported.
