Activist student editors face charges in Russia over Navalny

MOSCOW — Russian authorities leveled criminal charges Wednesday against four young editors of an online student magazine that had coverage about the nationwide protests supporting jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny earlier this year.

Police raided the Moscow apartments of the four Doxa magazine editors as well as the apartments of two of the editors’ parents and the magazine’s offices. The four were taken to Russia’s Investigative Committee for questioning and charged with encouraging minors to take part in illegal activity, according to Doxa and a human-rights group involved in their defense.

Doxa said the law enforcement actions were connected to a video the magazine ran about the January protests organized in support of Navalny. Mass protests engulfed cities across Russia’s 11 time zones for two weekends in a row in January and were the biggest in recent years, posing a major challenge for the Kremlin.

The video talked about the pressure school and university students faced before the protests and described threats of expulsion for participating in the demonstrations unlawful.

Russia’s media and internet watchdog, Roskomnadzor, demanded Doxa delete the video several days after it ran in late January, alleging that it contained information encouraging minors to take part in illegal activity. The magazine complied, but filed a lawsuit to contest the order, with the four editors — Armen Aramyan, Natalya Tyshkevich, Vladimir Metelkin and Alla Gutnikova — among the plaintiffs.

Doxa said Wednesday that the video contained “no calls for unlawful actions — we were saying that young people shouldn’t be afraid to express their opinion.”

“The pressure the journalist community has faced recently is unprecedented, but we won’t stop our work. We will continue to cover what’s important for young people and will continue to stand up for their rights,” the magazine’s statement read.

The charges against the four editors carry potential criminal penalties of up to three years in prison. They are part of the same criminal case Russian authorities opened against Navalny’s chief strategist, Leonid Volkov, who was accused of encouraging minors to take part in unauthorized rallies, according to Damir Gainutdinov, head of the Net Freedoms Project of the Agora human-rights organization.