According to a report, the video of a Russian student removed a portrait of President Vladimir Putin from her classroom wall.
Alina Morozova, a Yaroslavl student who is believed to be 16, was ordered with her father to a police station to explain her act of defiance, reports East2West News.
Videos of school children replacing portraits of Putin in their classrooms with those of Navalny went viral on TikTok.
The teenager apparently did not break any law by removing the strongman’s photo, so according to the newspaper, no punishment is imposed.
“The arrest of Alexei Navalny has caused great uproar not only among young people but also adults,” Alina, who posted a video of her act on TikTok, told Open Media.
“On TikTok, this resonance is impossible not to notice – everything screams about it, even jokes about it appear,” she said. “I did not think at all that the video could be viewed 2 million times live.”
The girl added that her teacher and the school director confronted her about her actions.
“They all had different opinions about my act, and they had the right to do so,” the teenager said.
But the portrait of the president is not a state symbol by law, she said, explaining why it is not illegal to remove it.
“With my video, I expressed my civic stance that everyone at school has the right,” Alina said.
But her teachers eventually reported her to the police, Alina added, saying they had a “preventative conversation” with her about the incident.
The Russian Ministry of Education has issued a statement urging parents to “protect” their children from events planned for Saturday, saying “no one has the right to lure young people into various political actions and provocations.”
Meanwhile, police in Moscow on Thursday night detained three leading collaborators of Navalny.
Discipline spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh was ordered to spend nine days behind bars on Friday, while Georgy Alburov was sentenced to ten days in prison.
Navalny’s close ally Lyubov Sobol was released late Thursday but ordered by a court to pay a $ 3,300 fine. All three are charged with violating protest regulations.
More than a dozen activists and Navalny allies in several Russian regions were also detained.
With the protests planned by his supporters on Saturday, the Russian prosecutor general and the police issued public warnings against attending or calling for unauthorized rallies.
Prosecutors also demanded that Roskomnadzor, the Russian media and internet watchdog, restrict access to websites containing calls for protest.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that ‘it is natural to be warned … about the possible consequences of non-compliance’, as there is a call for ‘unauthorized, illegal events’.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin urged residents not to attend a rally, citing coronavirus problems, calling the protest “illegal”.
Navalny was arrested on Sunday when he returned from Germany to Russia, where he spent nearly five months recovering from the nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
A judge on Monday sentenced him to 30 days in jail for alleged violations of a suspended jail sentence in an embezzlement case insisting he was tracked down.
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