On Friday, March 17, law enforcement officers came to the Underdog and La Virgen establishments in the center of the capital. The management, which owns both bars, is suspected of raising funds for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As a result, 40 people were detained – these are employees and visitors. Before that, they were kept in closed bars for several hours.
A video from Underdog appeared on the Web, in which five young people in handcuffs sing the song “Birches” by the Lube group. Security officers are standing nearby, one of them is conducting. Later, the letter Z and the inscription “For Russia” appeared on the glass door of Underdog.
The establishments themselves are temporarily closed, says the lawyer for the owners of the bars Underdog and La Virgen Konstantin Erokhin:
– Indeed, people in uniform quickly came to two establishments at once, everyone was pushed along the walls, someone was laid down, as far as I know. They began to selectively check phones, including tattoos. Then it became known that all this was carried out by the FSB with the support of the police, the department for ensuring the rule of law and the constitutional order. In the department, everything was quite civilized, someone was asked for phone numbers, personal data was checked, apparently, they were checked for involvement in offenses. As a result, everyone was released quite quickly, in two hours, given that there were about 40 people there, according to a police officer. This is a productive result. The survey was conducted by FSB officers in the police building. We don’t know much more about this situation. They took cash registers, people are in limbo, they hope that these were just one-time events. But however, the management has already made a number of decisions, and one of the decisions is to remove one of the participants from his post for the time being, probably, he will leave the project completely.
Why were the cash registers seized? Bars without them will not be able to work and will be temporarily closed?
“The decision to close was made in any case, primarily because people go there and I don’t want people to get into a situation where law enforcement officers conduct raids.
Business FM radio station was unable to get an operational comment from the Basmanny police department, where the detainees were taken last night. Last summer, a post appeared on the social networks of one of these bars announcing a charity market in support of a Ukrainian organization. The publication was soon deleted, the bar staff insisted that the account had been hacked.
