Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed his administration to work on a list of 16 people whom presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak asked him to pardon.
“Sobchak has indeed given such a list to the president. The president accepted it and ordered his administration to work on this list,” Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters on March 21.
“I can’t tell you anything else right now,” he said.
It was reported earlier that Ksenia Sobchak had given Putin a list of people whom she considers political prisoners and asked for them to be pardoned.
Among the 16 names on Sobchak’s list are Dmitry Borisov and Stanislav Zimovets (sentenced as part of ‘the March 26 case’), Alexander Kolchenko (a Crimean activist convicted of terrorism), Vladimir Lapygin (a scientist convicted of high treason), Sergei Mokhnatkin (a human rights campaigner convicted of violence against a police officer during a Strategy 31 protest), Oleg Navalny (the opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s brother who is serving a prison sentence in the Yves Rocher case), Alexei Sokolov (an RBC journalist convicted of forming an extremist group), and Oleh Sentsov (a Ukrainian film director who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for terrorism).
