According to ASTRA, Olga Shchekina, a former puppet theater actress from Donetsk, was detained on the street in Rostov on September 7. Her phone and personal belongings were taken away, and she was placed in a special detention facility under Article 20.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses on petty hooliganism. Lawyer Ilya Slyusarev said that for two years he has unsuccessfully been seeking the return of the passports and phone seized from Shchekina.
According to the defense attorney, at 21:00 on September 17, when the detention period was ending, the woman was taken out not through the main entrance but into the courtyard. There she was met by two masked men in civilian clothes, who shoved Shchekina into a car, while Slyusarev blocked the passage with his own vehicle. Then, the lawyer said, the head of the special detention facility came out into the courtyard and stated that the masked men had come for another matter.
After that, according to Slyusarev, patrol police and traffic police arrived, and from the way they spoke with him he concluded that the people who took Shchekina away were FSB officers. Three hours later, according to the defense attorney, she was taken to Donetsk and handed over to local police, who drew up a report for violating curfew. Shchekina spent the night at the police station.
Slyusarev learned about the hearing on September 18 only 2.5 hours before it began, when the judge called him, and managed to arrive from Rostov with documents about his client’s minor child and rheumatoid arthritis. The court in Donetsk imposed a fine of 1,000 rubles on Shchekina rather than administrative arrest; the lawyer said that, given these documents, arrest would have been prohibited by law. He also noted that the judge went into the deliberation room for 50 minutes, although usually, he said, such cases take about 10 minutes.
Shchekina is a former puppet theater actress from Donetsk. After TikTok videos set to Ukrainian songs, according to the defense, in 2023 she was detained, forced to record apologies, and then fined 77,000 rubles for public calls for separatism and displaying banned symbols. In June 2024, according to her, after filming the aftermath of a strike on the FSB building in Donetsk, she was detained again, beaten, and tortured with electricity in an apartment. Slyusarev said that Shchekina is now safe.
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