Politician Anatoly Bykov was not forgiven for "Our Siberia"

Popular blogger Nikolai Podosokorsky commented on today's high-profile event - the arrest of the businessman Anatoly Bykov:

“The new nineties are coming. Billionaires commit suicide, grassroots crime is growing, property is being redistributed. Today the 60-year-old former deputy of the Krasnoyarsk Legislative Assembly, businessman and politician Anatoly Bykov, known in criminal circles as “Tolya Byk”, was detained in the case of the murder in 1994 of two residents of Krasnoyarsk - Kirill Voitenko and Alexander Naumov, who, according to the investigation, were part of his criminal gang.

According to media reports, Bykov in the 1990s and early 2000s was the most influential person in the criminal world of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, a participant in the "aluminum wars", while he actively influenced not only business in the region, but also regional politics. In 1999-2003 he was convicted several times, then amnestied with the subsequent removal of a criminal record. In 1998-2000, he served as chairman of the Board of Directors of the Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Plant (1998-2000). From 1997 to 2016 he was a deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

In 2019, Bykov began to sharply criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin. "They are destroying the country step by step ... It feels like the enemy has seized power, and there is a struggle within the country against the economy, population, society, people and the enemy is already close to victory," he said in an interview. And this is from his other speech: “I am ashamed of the state. I have a feeling that our president does not live in Russia, he lives on another planet, I began to realize and understand this, although I voted for him for 15 years, campaigned. Now I’m starting to realize that it was a fallacy. It was an imitation of all the work".

In addition, Bykov came up with the idea of creating the Our Siberia political party, which would fight against the fact that Moscow was “eating up” regional money. In 2020, the term of restrictions expired, prohibiting Bykov, due to his criminal past, from participating in Russian elections. Probably, in connection with this, a new criminal prosecution was initiated for the events of 26 years ago..."