An activist tries and fails to burn down a monument to Boris Yeltsin in Yekaterinburg 🔥

On Tuesday, a man poured gasoline over a monument to Boris Yeltsin outside the Yeltsin Center museum in Yekaterinburg and set it ablaze. The perpetrator detained for the stunt is a National-Bolshevik activist named Igor Shchuka, who will reportedly be charged with vandalism. Representatives of the Yeltsin Center say the monument suffered no damage in the fire.

In 2007, Russia banned the National-Bolshevik political party as an extremist organization. It’s modern-day successor is the Other Russia (Drugaya Rossiya) movement.

In 2009, Igor Shchuka was sentenced to 10 months in prison for participating in an extremist group and for distributing leaflets that insulted then President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Shchuka later volunteered to fight with pro-Russian separatists against Ukrainian troops in the Donbas. He claims that Belarus has opened a criminal case against him for his combat service in Ukraine, but officials in Minsk deny this.