Putin takes revenge on the City Council in St. Petersburg after the call to oust him: Radical retaliation has come – Novy Čas

A group of municipal politicians in St. Petersburg who have called for President Putin to be ousted face the threat of having their city council dissolved following a judge’s ruling on Tuesday. The statement of one of the deputies, Nikita Juferev, was quoted by the Reuters news agency. According to Juferev, the judge ruled that the series of city council meetings in St. Petersburg’s Smolninskoye district is invalid. This paves the way for the governor to dissolve the council. Another member of the city council in Smolninsk, Dmitry Palyuga, announced that the same court fined him 47,000 rubles (about 780 euros) for calling for Putin’s ouster, that is, for “damaging the reputation” of Russian officials. In the next two days, four other members of the city council in Smoľninsko are to appear in court. A group of municipal deputies last week called on the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, to charge Putin with treason and remove him from power. They cited a series of reasons for this, such as the loss of life of Russian soldiers in Ukraine and the damage to the economy by Western sanctions. Another local deputy reported that 65 deputies from St. Petersburg, Moscow and several other cities had signed a petition calling on Putin to resign. The MP published the petition on Monday. While the moves do not directly threaten Putin’s power, they are a rare show of resistance at a time when Russians face stiff prison sentences for “damaging the reputation” of the Russian armed forces or spreading “deliberately false information” about them. Paľuga told Reuters before Tuesday’s hearing that the appeals of the group of deputies are addressed not only to liberal-minded Russians, but also to “people loyal to the authorities, who are beginning to have doubts about the failures of the Russian army.” He also expects their numbers to increase after a lightning counter-offensive by the Ukrainian army, which drove Russian forces out of dozens of cities and recaptured large swathes of territory in the Kharkiv region from the Russians.