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Moscow court to consider prolongation of arrest of controversial librarian

The director of the Ukrainian Library in Moscow Natalya Sharina was placed under house arrest on October 30, 2015, on charges of inciting hatred and/or hostility and humiliation of human dignity
Natalya Sharina, the director of the Ukrainian Library in Moscow Anton Novoderezhkin/TASS
Natalya Sharina, the director of the Ukrainian Library in Moscow
© Anton Novoderezhkin/TASS

MOSCOW, April 26. /TASS/. Moscow City’s Presnya district court is expected to consider on Tuesday a prolongation of house arrest for Natalya Sharina, the director of the Ukrainian Library in Moscow.

A request for the prolongation filed by investigators says the grounds, on which this pretrial measure was chosen for Sharina earlier, have not changed to date.

She was placed under house arrest on October 30, 2015, on charges of inciting hatred and/or hostility and humiliation of human dignity. At the beginning of April, the prosecutors added gross embezzlement charges to her.

Investigators say Sharina proliferated the book ‘War in the Crowd’ by the notable Ukrainian far-right nationalist Dmytro Korchynsky in the period of 2011 to 2015 among the readers of the Library of Ukrainian Ligerature. Published in Kiev in 1999, this book was prohibited as an item of extremist literature by the Meshchansky district court in Moscow in March 2013 and placed by the Russian Justice Ministry in special register of published works that cannot circulate on the Russian territory.

She came under investigation for the first time in 2012/2013 and investigators say she spent the monies earmarked for the library’s lawyers for her personal legal defence then.