The 2nd Western District Military Court of Moscow began to consider the merits of the criminal case of a native of Lukhovitsy near Moscow, 22-year-old Kirill Butylin. Speaking against the SVO, the young man painted the gates of the military registration and enlistment office, and then tried to set it on fire using bottles with a Molotov cocktail. Despite the fact that the defendant’s mother compensated for the damage caused by his actions, Butylin faces a long term for terrorism.
The meeting began with the announcement of the indictment, from which it followed that Kirill Butylin was charged by the Investigative Committee of Russia with committing crimes under Part 2 of Art. 205, part 2 of Art. 205.2 and part 2 of Art. 214 (terrorist attack; public calls to carry out terrorist activities and vandalism committed on the basis of hatred or enmity against any social group) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
According to the investigation, Kirill Butylin worked at the Lukhovitsky Aviation Plant named after Voronin as an aircraft assembler. On February 28, just a few days after the start of the special operation, he arrived in the early morning at the building where the military registration and enlistment offices of Lukhovits and Zaraysk are located. First, the young man, using cans of paint, painted the flag of Ukraine over the emblem of the armed forces of the Russian Federation on one gate leaf, and on the second he made an inscription with black paint, which he demonstrated “protest against the start of the SVO”, thereby expressing, in the opinion of the prosecutor, and “support troops of a foreign state.
Butylin then tried to break open the window of the Lukhovitsy draft office, but he did not succeed. Then he took out two Molotov cocktails prepared at home and threw them out the first floor window, hoping to set fire to the room where the conscripts’ personal files were located. The bottles failed to break the double-glazed windows installed on the windows, but a fire started. The attacker scrupulously recorded all his actions on a GoPro camera mounted on his head, and then uploaded the footage to the network. After that, the attacker, without waiting for the FSB and police to detain him, went to Belarus in order to move from it to Lithuania, where he was going to apply for political asylum.
However, on March 14, 2022, he was detained by Belarusian border guards. Butylin was returned to Russia, where the court placed him in a pre-trial detention center.
According to the state prosecutor, the young man “had a negative attitude towards the authorities” and decided to protest against the start of the SVO. On February 24, the prosecutor said, having read information in the Belarusian opposition telegram channel, he first went to an uncoordinated rally on Pushkinskaya Square in Moscow. There, he witnessed how Muscovite Anastasia Levashova threw a Molotov cocktail towards the police and subsequently received, according to the sentence of the Tverskoy District Court, two years in prison for using violence against a government representative (Article 318 of the Criminal Code).
“I plead guilty in full,” said the defendant Butylin, answering the judge’s question, and added that he committed the arson in an attempt to prevent mobilization for participation in hostilities.
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, which filed a civil lawsuit against the defendant for 193 thousand rubles, was recognized as the victim in the case by the investigation. By the way, even before the trial, Kirill Butylin’s mother repaid it in full, as the young man’s lawyer told the court. Obviously, later this circumstance, as well as the confession of guilt, will be taken into account as mitigating ones, but it is unlikely that it will be possible to avoid a strict regime, since the defendant faces 12 to 20 years in prison only for a terrorist attack.
