Antonina Kravtsova (Favorskaia)

She is a resident of Moscow and a journalist with SOTAvision. She was detained on 17 March 2024 in a cafe together with two other female journalists after visiting Alexei Navalny's grave at Borisovskoye cemetery, allegedly because of an anonymous call about a crime committed. The next day she was arrested for 10 days under the article on disobedience to the police (Article 19.3 of the Code of Administrative Offences). According to the law enforcers' version, she refused to show her documents, "waved her arms defiantly, grabbed the uniform and tried to run away". Favorskaia and another journalist Anastasia Musatova said in court that seven law enforcers (some of them were in plain clothes) burst into the establishment and immediately went towards them. When the journalists reached for their phones to put them in their pockets, the law enforcers started shouting about the prohibition of filming, and then knocked the phone out of Musatova's hands, while Favorskaia was thrown down on the table.

On 27 March, after serving an administrative sentence, Favorskaia was detained by officers of the Investigative Committee and taken away for questioning in a criminal case of participation in the activities of an extremist community. On the same day, law enforcers detained journalists Alexandra Astakhova and Anastasia Musatova, who came to the special detention centre to meet Favorskaia. All three were searched. Astakhova and Musatova were questioned and released as witnesses, Favorskaia was kept in the temporary detention cell. On 29 March she was taken into custody.

On 24 May, she was placed in the pre-trial detention centre on the preventive register as "a person who propagandises, professes or disseminates extremist ideology".

On 5 June it became known that the lawyer Fedor Sirosh, who represented Favorskaia's interests, was suspended from the case, because in 2019 he attended as a defender the interrogation of the lawyer of Navalny's team Evgeny Zamiatin in the case of money laundering (item "b" part 4 of article 174 of the Criminal Code).

On 15 April 2025, Favorskaia was sentenced to five and a half years in a general regime penal colony.

You can read more about politically persecuted people in the Telegram channel OVD-Info LIVE and our politically motivated criminal prosecutions in Russia database