The future legal defense of Ukrainian journalist Roman Sushchenko, on trial for an alleged espionage in Russia, was thrown into doubt on April 24 when the Moscow Bar Association stripped his lawyer of his attorney’s license.
Russian lawyer Mark Feygin was stripped of his license for using strong language on social media – which the bar’s qualification board found to be unethical behavior. Lawyer Stalina Gurevich, who filed a complaint against Feygin, told BBC Russian Service that Feygin had been warned of his inappropriate behavior, which, she said, embarrassed the attorney community.
Feygin responded by accusing the Moscow Bar Association of submitting to the will of the Kremlin. “I was stripped of attorney’s status for three tweets from July 19, 2017,” Feygin tweeted on April 24.
In July 2017, Feygin had a public row with a Ukrainian journalist and videoblogger Anatoly Shariy, who currently resides in Europe and has been accused of having anti-Ukrainian views. During the exchange, Feygin promised to make public all criminal cases against Shariy, including one on paedophilia.
Shariy then sued Feygin for libel and reportedly won his case.
Feygin, however, believes the decision to revoke his license was politically motivated. In the past few years, he has defended some of the most famous political prisoners in Russia, among them — the scandalous rock band Pussy Riot and Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison in Russia and then pardoned.
Most recently, Feygin has been working on the case of another Ukrainian prisoner in Russia, the France correspondent of Ukrainian newswire Ukrinform Roman Sushchenko, who has been held in custody in Moscow since October 2016 and accused of espionage.
On March 29, Moscow City Court extended journalist’s arrest for six months. The last hearing of Sushchenko’s case was on April 23 behind closed doors, where he denied the charges against him.
Feygin believes that Russian court will find Sushchenko guilty, but that the journalist may be exchanged in a future prisoner swap.
Feygin’s client Savchenko, for instance, was swapped on May 25, 2016, for Russian GRU officers Yevgeny Yerofeyev and Alexander Alexandrov, who had been captured by Ukraine.
