A resident of Murmansk, a former soldier of the Soviet army who served in Western Ukraine, was accused of negligence in the 1990s in a case of embezzlement of petroleum products in the unit, and the court imposed a large fine on him, which he paid the Ukrainian army for many years from his pension. After the start of the war, the Murmansk resident appealed to the Murmansk Regional Court with a request to stop the enforcement proceedings, citing the fact that in this way he finances the Armed Forces of Ukraine. However, the court refused him, referring to the Minsk Convention. The SeverPost publication writes about this with reference to Yana Kotlovskaya, a resident of Murmansk and a member of the Bar Association of the Murmansk Region.
The previous attempt to stop paying the fine was made by the man before the war, in 2019, when the money sent to him began to return for some reason. The publication suggests that this could be due to the fact that the unit was disbanded or its details changed. As a result, the money began to settle in the bank in the account for unclaimed amounts.
The Murmanchanin appealed to the court with a request to stop transferring money from his pension and to return to him 175 thousand rubles that had hung on the account. But he was refused, because the enforcement proceedings were not closed. It is noted that the representative of the bank was on the side of the court.
The "Convention on Legal Assistance and Legal Relations in Civil, Family and Criminal Matters" (Minsk Convention) was concluded in Minsk in January 1993 by the CIS countries. Neither Russia nor Ukraine left it, so the legal document continues to operate.
Kotlovskaya tried to use the law on combating extremism and terrorism as an argument in court, but it turned out that there are no legal documents in Russia that put the Armed Forces of Ukraine on a par with terrorists, the newspaper notes. The applicant filed an appeal, and the case will now be considered by the Second Court of Appeal in St. Petersburg.
