Denis Bakholdin

On the night of 9 March 2017, he was detained near the village of Suzemka in the Bryansk region on suspicion of violating the state border regime. On 10 March, he became a suspect for participation in the activities of an extremist organisation. According to Bakholdin, after his detention, he was handcuffed to a radiator for 12 hours, beaten on the legs and head, thus trying to extract a confession that he was a member of the Right Sector. On 12 March he was arrested. On 6 April he was subjected to an outpatient psychiatric examination at the Bryansk regional psychiatric hospital. According to him, the doctors asked him questions on the merits of the criminal case. He refused to answer them, after which the experts decided that they could not make a definite conclusion about his sanity and sent Bakholdin for inpatient examination in Moscow, to the Centre of Social and Forensic Psychiatry named after Serbsky.

In mid-April, an FSB officer came to the home of Denis' mother at his place of residence in Moscow and asked her about her son. At the end of May, FSB officers searched Bakholdin's place of residence and seized the hard drive of his mother's computer; his belongings were not in the house.

On 17 August he was transferred to Moscow. After a short stay in a psychiatric hospital in Butyrka, he was transferred to the Serbsky Centre on 28 August. There, according to Bakholdin, the staff also began to ask him questions on the merits of the case, he refused to answer. Then they began to apply psychological pressure to him, and as a protest Bakholdin declared a dry hunger strike, which, according to him, lasted for 5 days.

On 6 September, he was returned to Butyrka. On 16 September he was transferred back to Bryansk. Later, Bakholdin was transferred to SIZO-2 Novozybkov and placed in a special block.

In March 2018, Bakholdin was escorted to Moscow after the case was transferred to a Moscow court. On 20 April, the court ruled to return the case to the prosecutor's office.

On 24 December 2018, he was sentenced to three and a half years in a general regime colony.

On 14 August 2019, he was released from prison.