The Southern District Military Court sentenced Igor Paskar to eight and a half years in prison for setting fire to a Z-banner and symbolically throwing a Molotov cocktail at the FSB building in Krasnodar. This is reported by the "Solidarity Zone".
According to a court decision, Pascar must spend the first three years in prison, and the rest in a strict regime colony.
On the eve of the court , Pascari made his final speech . The Insider quotes it in full:
“About a year has passed since my act. During this year, I have repeatedly replayed in my head this hour when I will be given [the opportunity] to make the last word, the text with which I will speak, the motives that prompted me to go for it. In the previous meeting, Your Honor, you asked if I was repentant? I understand that the severity of punishment may depend on the degree of repentance. But I'll be dishonest if I say I've given up my beliefs. On the contrary, during the time that has passed in prison, I was personally convinced of the injustice being committed against the called fraternal people: both prisoners of war of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and ordinary citizens of Ukraine. The war, no matter how we label it, came to their house and disrupted their way of life. And no matter what slogans and geopolitical interests we use to cover it up, for me it has no justification.
Do I regret what happened? Yes, perhaps I wanted to live life differently, but I did so at the behest of my conscience, and I am clear before it. Instead of arguing about who is right and who is wrong, I would like to ask the question: what did each of us do to stop this nightmare? What will we tell our children and grandchildren about this troubled time in ten or fifteen years?
Unfortunately, God did not reward me with the joy of fatherhood, the closest people left, and I was left alone with myself. It was easy for me to take this step, despite the fact that I was aware of what was waiting for me. There was no one to worry about me, there was no one to worry and root for my fate. But what I really did not expect was how many letters, how many words of support I received. They wrote from various parts of Russia and not only. Many were grateful for my position, which is at odds with the terms of popular support for what is being created. Many words of encouragement: "be strong in spirit", "do not despair". Many words of sympathy, warmth. But I will take the liberty of reading out only one fragment of a letter received in May, which did not leave me indifferent and forced me to write my last word:
“ There is very little left of everyday life. Not going out to live an ordinary life. I listen to the memoirs of prisoners from the 30s – 50s. Now I am listening to an amazing biography of Tamara Petkevich, seven years old. Arrested in 1943, survived until 2017. In the year of her arrest, she was 22 years old, a girl completely, two times younger than me. I never read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and Shalamova missed Kolyma Tales . And now I listen to Petkevich and understand that this is exactly what we should listen to, read at school. We as a country are immersed in the past, we almost never think about the present and do not think about the future. The Americans have the American dream, something to strive for, but we have nothing but an obsession with what is long gone, something that cannot be returned. But we again and again try to return the departed, although there is no point in these attempts. We seem to be stuck as a country. We are stuck as individuals in sensations. It’s terrible that as long as we stubbornly turned our heads back, we couldn’t live happily, live as we want. I want people to find happiness in ordinary things .
Pascari is the first to be convicted of anti-war arson under a terrorism article. He was charged with two criminal articles: committing a terrorist act (part 1 of article 205 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and vandalism (part 2 of article 214 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
Pascaria, 46, was detained in mid-June 2022. He is accused of throwing a "Molotov cocktail" at the front door of the FSB building on Mira Street in Krasnodar, which set the rug near the entrance on fire. A small fire was extinguished by the staff of the department. Pascar is also accused of setting fire to the Z-banner.
In January, Paskar told the court how he was tortured during his arrest by FSB officers. According to him, they put a bag over his head and kicked him, put a grenade in his hands, put a barrel to his head and tortured him with electric current. After all this, Paskar said, he was taken with a bag over his head to the investigator Yuri Zakharchenko, who opened a criminal case under the article on terrorism.
