MOSCOW, August 31. /TASS/. Russia’s blogger Yegor Zhukov was taken to hospital with suspected head injury after being attacked by unknown people in Moscow, spokesman for the ‘Team of Zhukov’ Stas Toporkov told TASS.

"Provisional diagnosis is concussion and closed craniocerebral injury," he said.

Moscow’s police have started an inspection after the beating of blogger Yegor Zhukov by two unknown persons. Zhukov was attacked and beaten near his house late on Sunday.

A source in press service of Moscow’s office of Russia’s Main Directorate of the Internal Affairs Ministry told TASS that a young man appealed to the police claiming infliction of bodily injury on Sunday. He said that two unknown persons had beaten him and fled the scene. "An inspection is underway on that fact, the issue of initiation of a criminal case under Article 116 of the Russian Criminal Code (‘Battery’) is under consideration," the source said.

The blogger 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.