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Vadim Klyuvgant, vice president of the Federal Chamber of Attorneys, and Konstantin Dobrynin, deputy president of the FCA, have resigned from the Chamber's board to avoid agreeing with Russia's decision to annex Ukraine's territories. A copy of the resignation letter is at the disposal of The Insider.
The attorneys wrote a joint statement on the impossibility for them to serve on the Chamber’s board.
Dobrynin and Klyuvgant were among the main initiators and signatories of the FCA's anti-war statement. Dobrynin resigned from his post as official secretary of the Chamber, stating that he could not perform his duties “due to the current situation.” The anti-war statement was followed by a scandal, as some of the FCA board members spoke out in support of the “special operation.” They were added to Alexei Navalny's list of people to be subjected to the EU sanctions. The list included President of the FCA Yuri Pilipenko, who also signed an anti-war statement.
Both statements were removed from the APC website because of the scandal, and those who signed the anti-war statement were required to withdraw their signatures. A source in the Chamber told The Insider that one of the signatories of the anti-war statement, the president of the Moscow region’s Chamber of Attorneys Alexei Galoganov, withdrew his signature and signed an alternative statement.
After Russia’s annexation of the “DNR” and “LNR”, as well as the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, the FCA may include new chambers of attorneys operating in the annexed Ukrainian territories. The departure of the attorneys may be due to their unwillingness to associate themselves with such decisions.
On September 27, on the eve of the annexation of Ukrainian regions, Konstantin Aranovsky, a judge of the Russian Constitutional Court, who often disagreed with the decisions of the CC, tendered his resignation; earlier he opposed restrictions on foreigners' ownership of Russian media and spoke out against censorship in Russia. The court did not give any reasons for his resignation.
Earlier, Vladislav Inozemtsev, Ph.D. in Economics and director of the Center for Post-Industrial Society Research, told The Insider that the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) proposed adding the chiefs of the Federal Chamber of Attorneys, in particular Igor Mikhailovich, Alexei Galoganov, and Yuri Pilipenko, to the sanctions lists. However, according to Inozemtsev, it is not necessary to impose sanctions against those individuals, since not all members of the Chamber of Attorneys are “friends of the regime.” According to Inozemtsev, we need to be careful with lawyers, who “play a rather positive role in contemporary Russian society and are themselves often targeted by the regime.”