Screenshot: Kazancity / Telegram
A teenage resident of Kazan, in Russia’s Volga region, has been fined 40,000 rubles (€423) for “rehabilitating Nazism” after he was accused of spitting in the city’s Eternal Flame war memorial, Russian human rights group OVD-Info reported on Tuesday, citing local media.
The high-profile case in the republic of Tatarstan was sparked by a Telegram video from November which went viral that depicted three teenage boys squatting by the Eternal Flame to warm their hands, before one extinguishes it with a snowball. The fourth boy was recording the video.
Found across Russia and former Soviet states, Eternal Flames are continuously burning war memorials commemorating the Soviet dead of the Second World War.
Although criminal cases were initially opened against all four of the teenagers, charges against three were dropped, including the one who actually threw the snowball, as they were under 14, the age of criminal liability under the Russian Criminal Code’s article on “rehabilitating Nazism”, according to Tatar-inform, Tatarstan’s state-backed news agency.
The fourth boy, who was convicted and fined by the Supreme Court of Tatarstan for spitting in the Eternal Flame, was over 14, Tatar-inform reported.
“The child sitting in front of you has experienced enough stress, and does not need any extra burden,” one of the teenager’s relatives said in court on Tuesday, requesting that the attending press leave the hearing, according to Tatar-inform. The boy’s name has not been disclosed.
Regional officials criticised the children’s families and educators following the incident, with Tatarstan Youth Minister Rinat Sadykov saying in November that the teenagers must “realise the gravity of their deed and repent for what they had done, with the support of parents, teachers and psychologists”.
This is not the first time that Russian authorities have targeted children for perceived disrespect towards war memorials. A criminal case was opened in June after an eight-year-old boy poured water on an Eternal Flame memorial in the Yaroslavl region, in central Russia.