Russian film director charged for underwear protest outside FSB headquarters

Law enforcement officers have written up Russian film director Vitaly Mansky for the administrative offense of taking part in an unauthorized demonstration (under article 20.2, section 5 of the Administrative Code), lawyer Alena Borisova from the rights group Pravozashchity Otkrytki told MBX Media. 

Mansky was charged over a single-person picket he conducted on December 22, in response to new revelations regarding the August 2020 poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny. 

On December 21, Navalny shared a video revealing that he had managed to fool an FSB operative implicated in his poisoning into detailing the Kremlin’s operation. Among other things, the FSB agent divulged that the poison used on Navalny was applied to the inside of a pair of his underwear (which were blue).

After Navalny released the video, protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg came out in support of him. The FSB dismissed the recorded conversation as fake.

During his protest, Mansky stood outside the FSB headquarters in Moscow holding a pair of blue boxer shorts. 

According to Borisova, Mansky was charged with participating in a “public mass event in hidden form.” In the protocol, the pair of underwear was described as “a means of visual agitation.” 

“For several days immediately after, from December 21 to 25, different people, no one [who] knew each other, went out to different solo pickets. Some of them with some posters, some, like Vitaly Vsevolodovich [Mansky], with underwear. The Meshchansky police station decided to record them as one protest, they categorically refused to consider that it was an individual picket,” Borisova said.