Investigators notified journalist Aleksei Seregin of the new case on August 28. The charge, under Part 1 of Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code (incitement of hatred or enmity against a group of persons), was announced in a post on Seregin's Telegram channel. The specific allegations have not been disclosed.
Seregin is being held in pretrial detention center No. 2 in Kazan. "From the moment of my arrest, I did not believe my lawyer's reassuring words. I thought I was going to certain death behind bars," he wrote.
The journalist was detained on June 4 in Yoshkar-Ola. The first case against him was opened on charges of justifying terrorism (Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code) over a two-year-old comment about Dzhokhar Dudayev, the first president of the self-proclaimed Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. In the post, Seregin wrote that responsibility for the military actions in Chechnya lay with Boris Yeltsin and that Dudayev had been ready for negotiations even before the armed conflict began in 1994.
Seregin has said that during his arrest, police officers tortured him with electric shocks, demanding he unlock his mobile phone. He was subsequently fined 2,000 rubles for disobeying law enforcement officers (Article 19.3 of the Administrative Code).
While in detention, a second case was opened against Seregin for repeatedly failing to fulfill the duties of a foreign agent (Article 330.1 of the Criminal Code) over a Telegram post that "remained unmarked for several minutes." The journalist was designated a "foreign agent" in November 2024.