In Moscow, for the third time this week, a solo protester from North Ossetia was detained outside the Prosecutor General’s Office.

Police officers detained Yulia Melnichenko, a resident of North Ossetia, outside the Prosecutor General’s Office. She was holding a solo protest demanding that complaints from her family be considered. Melnichenko herself told OVD-Info about the incident.

After being detained, she was taken to the Tverskoy District police station.

At the station, Melnichenko was issued a formal warning about the inadmissibility of legal violations. Her placard was also confiscated. Two hours after her detention, the protester was released.

This is already Melnichenko’s third detention this week. She was previously detained on 24 and 25 February. In both cases, she was also taken to the station and then released without a formal charge.

According to Melnichenko, after her second detention, police told her that if she continues staging solo pickets outside the Prosecutor General’s Office, she will be detained for three hours each time. She was also told that the Prosecutor General’s Office would not consider her family’s complaints.

• Melnichenko’s family lives in North Ossetia, a region in the North Caucasus. Since 2019, they have been seeking to bring a police officer to justice for beating Melnichenko’s brother. The family also accuses the local prosecutor’s office of unlawfully seizing a plot of land. Melnichenko stages protests to push the Prosecutor General’s Office to consider her family’s complaints. She believes that the Investigative Committee and the prosecutor’s office in the republic are biased against her family because they are Ukrainian.