On August 28, the Lenin District Court of Perm ordered the detention of Irina Faizulina, wife of civic activist and human rights defender Artem Faizulin from Berezniki. She will remain in pre-trial detention until October 15, 2025. The day before, security forces searched the couple’s apartment, seizing two laptops, three mobile phones, and all bank cards. According to her husband, Irina is suspected of transferring money to the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK).
At the investigator’s request, the court session was held behind closed doors. The presiding judge was Maria Yakutova.
Artem Faizulin, a former lawyer with Alexei Navalny’s Perm office, called his wife’s arrest “a perverse act of cruelty” and emotionally commented to Perm 36.6:
I desperately want to be there instead of her, but they don’t give me that opportunity… They could have found plenty of pretexts to lock me up. But they locked her up. Right now, I honestly don’t know how to live with this.”
The activist believes the authorities are using his wife’s arrest as leverage against him. Faizulin has previously been targeted by law enforcement. He was dismissed from the Interior Ministry for his sympathies toward Alexei Navalny, later became a human rights defender, and ran a channel monitoring repressive practices in Russia. He has collaborated with major rights projects, including OVD-Info, and also ran for local office, though unsuccessfully. His wife Irina had also been engaged in civic activism.