A court in Volgograd ordered pretrial detention for blogger Svyatoslav Kovalenko and his friend Andrei Yaroshenko. They are charged with desecrating military graves and memorial structures, committed by a group of people in a preliminary conspiracy (paragraphs 'a' and 'b' of part 2 of Article 243.4 of the Russian Criminal Code). The maximum penalty under this article is up to five years in prison.
According to investigators, on July 24 Kovalenko threw a 5,000-ruble note into the pool surrounding the 'Stand to the Death!' sculpture on Mamayev Kurgan and invited passersby to retrieve it. Yaroshenko, posing as a random visitor, jumped into the water for the money. Kovalenko recorded the incident on video and posted it on social media.
The blogger himself claimed he had not initially planned to film the video. According to him, he threw the banknote into the pool and returned an hour later, noticed people's reaction to the money, and decided to 'capture it' on camera. He also said that 'initially there was no intent to film.'
The Investigative Committee launched a probe into the video in July, after which it examined footage from cameras on Mamayev Kurgan. Kovalenko and Yaroshenko, according to local media, were detained in Podolsk and Kislovodsk. In a video published by the Investigative Committee, both admit guilt.
Kovalenko is a sports blogger and pop-MMA fighter; his YouTube channel has about 950,000 subscribers. In 2012, he was sentenced to five years for drug trafficking, did not admit guilt, and spent just over four years in a penal colony.