Feedback When a Moscow court sentenced a 16-year-old boy from the republic of Chechnya to nearly two years in a penal colony last month, it did so in defiance of Chechens across the political spectrum.
Murdiev was placed under house arrest in December 2023 following a brawl at the Khodynskoye Polye park in the northwest of the Russian capital.
Prosecutors maintained that he and four other boys deliberately provoked the fight by verbally attacking an unsuspecting passerby. Russia’s Investigative Committee said the episode was just one in a series of street fights incited by the teens that resulted in eight people injured.
<…> human rights defender Stefania Kulaeva cautioned against seeing the trial solely through the lens of ethnic discrimination.
Though people from the Caucasus and especially Chechnya do indeed face ethnic profiling, “the question of how the investigation and the court treated this particular case can only be discussed against other similar cases involving teenagers,” Kulaeva, an expert at the Brussels-based Anti-Discrimination Center (ADC) Memorial, told The Moscow Times.
“Why did the scandal break out over this boy only? Was it because the others weren’t Chechen and Ramzan [Kadyrov] didn’t care [about them]? Who were those other teenagers, anyway?” she asked, referring to the four other defendants who received harsher sentences of up to three and a half years in prison.
“That’s at the core of the question of whether there was bias or not,” she said.
Either way, Kulaeva believes that Murdiev’s story touches on several other important issues facing Russian society, namely the wartime rises in street violence and imprisonment of teenagers even for minor offenses.
Russian authorities are increasingly using imprisonment as a disciplinary measure against teenagers who criticize the war in Ukraine or government policies.
At least 544 minors had been detained over anti-war protests as of 2023, according to human rights watchdog OVD-Info.
At least 56 teenagers aged 14 to 17 were behind bars on charges of terrorism and sabotage activities as of December 2024 and 166 were added to Russia’s “terrorists and extremists” registry that same year, according to the Memorial human rights group.
“Never before have there been so many arrested teenagers receiving extremely long sentences,” said Kulaeva.
“In Russia, children are imprisoned even for online communications — including private ones — for statements on social media, and so on. So it’s hard to consider Murdiev’s case something exceptional,” she noted.
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