MOSCOW, July 9 (RAPSI) – The leader of the Restruct nationalist movement Maxim Martsinkevich has filed a parole petition in connection with the partial decriminalization of an article of the Russian Criminal Code whereby he had been sentenced to 2 years and 10 months in prison for extremist posts on a social network.

Moscow’s Preobrazhensky District Court will hear the application on July 17, the court’s spokesperson Alexandra Savelyeva has told RAPSI.

The convict asks to release him from serving the sentence passed in August 2014 by Moscow’s Kuntsevo District Court.

Martsinkevich, an infamous Russian nationalist, has a history of clashes with the law. In 2014, he was sentenced to five years in prison for publishing extremist content on the Internet.

He was also convicted of publishing online a video of staging a pretentious execution of a “Tajik drug dealer” and extremist statements and received 3.5 years in prison in two cases taken together.

In December 2018, Moscow’s Babushkinsky District Court gave Martsinkevich 10 years in prison for robbery and hooliganism.  His associate, a leader of the St. Petersburg cell of Restruct movement established by Martsinkevich, Mikhail Shalankevich received a 6-year prison term but was released due to the time served in detention.

Besides Martsinkevich, nine members of the Restruct movement were involved in the case. According to case documents, under pretense of drug interdiction, the group attacked people who sell smoking mixtures in 2013-2014 in Moscow using electro shockers, gas sprayers and metallic pipes, leaving several people traumatized and one person dead.

The case was reconsidered as in May 2018 the Moscow City Court overturned a specific part of the defendant’s 10-year prison term concerning robbery and hooliganism and ordered the case review. The court also mitigated sentence for three associates of Martsinkevich, who were also defendants in the case. Dmitry Sheldyashev and Alexander Shankin were sentenced to 5 years and 10 months in a penal colony while Roman Maksimov received 4 years and 10 months.