A 57-year-old Russian man faces up to five years behind bars after cursing out an 11-year-old boy he spotted wearing a pro-war hat.
Authorities in Yekaterinburg launched a full-on manhunt for the man after the incident last week sparked outrage among Russia’s warmongering “patriots,” and riot police took him into custody on Monday, police said. Almost immediately after his arrest, the man, Alexander Nyeustroyev, was seen in a video released by police apologizing for his remarks to the boy.
“I repent for what I did, I admit that I was wrong,” he said in the apparently forced apology.
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The boy at the receiving end of his tirade had been wearing a black beanie with a large “Z” emblazoned on it, a symbol now used widely in Kremlin propaganda and elsewhere to show support for the war against Ukraine.
Nyeustroyev, according to local reports, had spotted the boy wearing the hat on the street and erupted at him, yelling: “Shove that hat up your ass! Moron, dammit. Tell your parents. Idiots. Call your father here.”
The boy’s mother, identified only as Lyudmila, told local media her son had “come home in tears” after the incident. After filing a complaint with police, she alleged that Nyeustroyev had “tried to grab” her son, though video of the encounter circulated widely in local media showed nothing of the sort.
She said her husband, the 11-year-old boy’s father, is a member of the military who is currently serving in the so-called “special military operation” against Ukraine. Her son picked out the hat to show support for his father, she said.
While Russian troops have now been indiscriminately killing Ukrainian civilians in their own homes for more than a year, the mother went on to complain of how traumatizing the curse words were for her family.
“I’m very scared for my son. His father is far away. Anything could happen to us while there are such crazies walking around. They can even beat us. After all, he chose a victim who cannot fight back.”
Nyeustroyev had initially faced misdemeanor charges for the encounter, but the Investigative Committee has since upped the charges against him and Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin is personally overseeing the case.
In announcing the charges against the “hater of the symbol of the special military operation,” a spokesman for the Sverdlovsk branch of the Interior Ministry noted that he had no previous criminal record and was not currently “receiving psychiatric treatment.”
