On 1 March 2023, journalist Alexey Seregin received a call from an unknown man, who advised him to change his phone number and place of residence due to publications he made linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The caller said that “a decision had been made” to imprison the journalist “for 10 to 20 years”, and that he did not know whether security forces would plant drugs on him, accuse him of “discrediting the Russian army”, or find another pretext to arrest him. The unknown man added that one of Seregin’s publications had angered “high-ranking persons”.
According to Seregin, the caller, who claimed that he was acting in good faith, meant to intimidate him for his publications. The journalist said he had filed a complaint with police, following which he was contacted again by the caller, who asked him if he had “understood [their] previous conversation” and why he continued to publish blog posts.
In January, the deputy mayor of Yoshkar-Ola, the capital of Russia’s Mariy El region, where Seregin lives, demanded that the journalist be held responsible for reposting a Telegram post by independent media SOTA Vision. The post showed a photo from a spontaneous memorial in Yoshkar-Ola created by local residents to commemorate the victims of a Russian missile attack on a residential building in Dnipro, Ukraine.
UPDATE: On 5 April 2023, Seregin filed a complaint with the local prosecutor’s office, asking to overturn an earlier decision by the police, which refused to open a criminal case linked to the threats he had received.