Mikhail Aleksandrovich Kosenko

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Kosenko (; born 8 July 1975) is a Russian activist who is a defendant in the Bolotnaya Square case. A participant in a protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin that took place in Bolotnaya Square in Moscow on May 6, 2012, the day before Putin's third-term inauguration, Kosenko was charged with participating in “mass riots” and with “threatening the life or health of a representative of authority.” Although Kosenko and his fellow defendants in the case, Artiom Saviolov and Vladimir Akimenkov, professed their innocence and were backed up by ample video evidence, they were found guilty, with Kosenko sentenced to forced psychiatric treatment.

Early life and education Kosenko was born on July 8, 1975. and sustained a concussion.

The concussion left Kosenko with mild psychiatric problems. He was diagnosed with mild schizophrenia and declared a mental invalid. who has “a long mustache and droopy eyes,” led “a quiet, normal life, primarily staying inside the Moscow apartment he shared with his sister Ksenia (sometimes transliterated as Kseniya) and her adult son, where he listened to the radio and read books on Communist history. In late 2011 and early 2012, when a large-scale opposition movement broke out into the open in Moscow, it gave Kosenko a chance to take part in something, to be among like-minded people and express his political ideas.” Ksenia told the New Yorker that he viewed this development, which “took him a while to digest,” as “great” and “inspiring.” was charged under Article 212, Section 2, and Article 318, Section 2, of the Russian Criminal Code.

Ksenia Kosenko later told Amnesty International: “When some people started to fight with a police officer, [Mikhail] just stood there, trying to shield himself. He was taken to the police station and they took a photo of him. When a decision was taken to open a criminal case into mass riots at Bolotnaya Square, they started to compare their photos with the video footage. They had a photo, they found a video, and interpreted them in a certain way. That was it: the charges were ready.” Ksenia was not allowed to see her brother once during the two months following his arrest.

Diagnosis

During the trial investigation, the Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry stated that it had diagnosed Kosenko as a paranoid schizophrenic who was “dangerous for himself and others.” The defense asked for a new evaluation, but the request was turned down. Kosenko's case was investigated separately from other cases stemming from the Bolotnaya Square incident because the investigators wanted him to be forcibly subjected to psychiatric treatment.

Kosenko's diagnosis was widely criticized. Russian psychiatrist Andrey Bilzho called it “the death of psychiatry.” Human-rights activist and Soviet-era dissident Alexander Podrabinek, author of a book about the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, agreed: “This is a clear case of a return to punitive psychiatry in Russia," he said. “This is the first such clear and obvious instance in the post-Soviet period.”

In an October 9, 2013, New Yorker article headlined “The Insanity of Protesting against Putin,” Joshua Yaffa reported that the state was presenting the Bolotnaya Square case as a conspiracy that had been planned abroad, and that Kosenko was the first of twenty-eight people charged in the case to receive a verdict. “At the very least,” wrote Yaffa, “his case sends a signal about the Kremlin’s rapaciousness not just in prosecuting the Bolotnaya defendants but in its desire to clamp down on all those in the opposition or sympathetic to it.”

Amnesty reported on December 2, 2013, that Kosenko was “not receiving regularly the medication he needs.”

Appeal and aftermath

On March 25, 2014, the Moscow City Court upheld the verdict on appeal. Kosenko's sister Maria said afterwards that she and her brother had had “a small thread of hope that maybe some sort of mercy and fairness was possible, but it turned out that it wasn't. This was just another charade of Russian justice, which doesn't in fact exist. ” Kosenko's lawyers said they would file another appeal but added that they did not have much hope for a favorable verdict.