According to Mediazona, in October 16, 38-year-old Vasily Kuksov was released from Penal Colony No. 16 in the Nizhny Novgorod region. 17th of October he arrived by train in Serdobsk, in the Penza region, where he reunited with his family.
In 2020, Kuksov, a musician and design engineer, was sentenced in Penza to nine years in a penal colony in the case of the “Network organization” (the defendants in this case received sentences of up to 18 years in prison).
The criminal case was opened in October 2017. At the time, FSB officers accused anti-fascists and anarchists, many of whom shared an interest in airsoft, of creating a “terrorist organization” and planning to “mobilize the masses to further destabilize the political situation in the country.”
Over the course of that month, security forces detained Kuksov, as well as Ilya Shakursky, Dmitry Pchelintsev, Andrey Chernov, Arman Sagynbayev, and Yegor Zorin. The formal grounds for initiating the criminal prosecution were Zorin's confession. The young man had been detained with drugs and gave testimony about a terrorist organization. The case against him was subsequently dropped. In January 2018, Viktor Filinkov and Igor Shishkin were detained in St. Petersburg in connection with the same case. On April 11, another St. Petersburg resident, Yuly Boyarshinov, was also charged.
Initially, most of the defendants made confessions, but later retracted them, stating that they had been tortured. Viktor Filinkov, Dmitry Pchelintsev, Ilya Shakursky, Arman Sagynbayev, and Andrey Chernov reported violence and electric shocks inflicted by security officers. The Investigative Committee did not open a criminal investigation into any of the defendants' allegations of torture. Five witnesses in the case also reported torture and pressure from security forces.
Vasily Kuksov told the court that FSB officers beat him during his arrest, saying, “You're screwed, your life is over,” and threatened to cut off his finger. Despite this, he never made a confession.
During the investigation, while being held in Penza's Pre-Trial Detention Centre No. 1, he was diagnosed with active tuberculosis shortly before his sentencing. He was not hospitalized and continued to be held together with other defendants in the case.
After the verdict in the Network case came into force, Kuksov was transferred in November 2020 to Medical Correctional Institution No. 3 (LIU-3) for tuberculosis patients in Nizhny Novgorod. He was discharged from the medical facility in January 2022. After that, at Penal Colony No. 16 in the Nizhny Novgorod region, he was repeatedly placed in a punishment cell.
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