Mark Kuperman

Chairman of the Sakhalin branch of the Movement for Human Rights, former mayor of town of Okha. On the morning of 27 April 2024, he was searched in the case of calls to extremism. The reason for the case was a message to a distribution list in Telegram. According to the law enforcement version, Kuperman sent to "an unidentified group of persons" a document entitled "Plan for Western participation in regime change in Russia. Humanitarian occupation." The document was an article by Lev Ponomarev, head of the Movement for Human Rights. According to the lawyer, Kuperman did send the text to several acquaintances and discussed the document in his flat - as it turned out later, the flat was bugged. In December, the charge was reclassified to calls to terrorism. One of the participants in the meeting at Kuperman's flat, Maksim Yermolenko, appeared at the trial as a secret witness and said that the defendant "is an anti-Russian person who supports the policies pursued by Western countries and Ukraine." According to the defense lawyer, after the meeting with Kuperman, Ermolenko tried to leave the country but was detained, and by then a case had been opened against him, presumably for draft evasion - he was apparently pressured to testify against Kuperman. In June 2025, the court sentenced the human rights defender to a fine of 500,000 rubles with a two-year ban on publishing on the Internet.