MOSCOW, August 31. /TASS/. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov hopes that the attackers of blogger Yegor Zhukov will be found and punished in accordance with the law.

Yegor Zhukov was attacked and beaten near his house in Moscow late on Sunday. The police have launched criminal proceedings over the incident.

"We hope that the attackers will be found and punished in accordance with the law," Peskov told reporters. He called on the media not to rush to conclusions over the blogger’s critical stance on the Russian government. "We do not know who beat up Zhukov and we do not know why <…>," he stressed.

Yegor Zhukov was arrested on August 2, 2019, on charges of participating in mass riots in Moscow on July 27, 2019. A month later, he was placed under house arrest upon the investigators’ request. Later, the Russian Investigative Committee dropped the initial charge, but instead accused him of public calls for extremism. According to the case files, the new charges were based on Zhukov’s videos posted on YouTube. The court said in its verdict that the blogger's guilt was confirmed by search protocols in his house and expert evidence. An expert of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Korshikov admitted that although he did not find any direct calls for violence in Zhukov’s words, he drew a conclusion that the blogger stirred up violence. The prosecutor demanded a four-year prison sentence for Zhukov. The court gave him a three-year suspended sentence. The blogger was also banned from creating and managing his own Internet pages for two years.