An activist from Volzhsky was released after her arrest.

In early March, a 20-year-old Volzhsky resident submitted documents to the Volgograd mayor's office seeking approval for a rally against the blocking and slowdown of the popular Telegram messenger. In response, the Volgograd mayor's office proposed postponing the event "until the situation stabilizes." The organizer refused, after which "plainclothes men" approached her. On March 12, the rally organizer reported that three "plainclothes men" came to her workplace and threatened her employer with problems, after which she was temporarily suspended. She then submitted a notice of a rally in Volzhsky, but was denied permission on March 20. After the Volzhsky mayor's office refused permission for the rally for a second time, Varvara Luch received a police warning about the inadmissibility of holding unauthorized public events and announced the cancellation of the rally. Varvara Luch herself announced her release from custody on her Telegram channel.

According to the activist, she was detained under the article on propaganda or public display of symbols of extremist organizations 1 for an old TikTok video she published in May 2024, in which investigators noticed an LGBT* flag.

"One of them showed the popular singer Olga Buzova waving an extremist flag. The others showed the Olympics in the Russian Federation, the World Cup, IKEA, flight information boards around the world, and concerts of foreign bands in the Russian Federation. And all this was accompanied by the lines from the song by Monetochka** - "It was in Russia, which means it was a long time ago," Luch wrote in the message.

According to Luch, in the detention center with She was treated normally, fed on schedule, though not in a particularly luxurious way, and not beaten.

"The police officers who detained me were quite polite. I'm grateful to them for that. They didn't beat me in the detention center, they fed me three times a day (the food wasn't great, but soup and bread were fine), and they kept the light on in the cell, even at night—I slept with it on and helped with cleaning. "I was alone in the cell almost my entire time, only on the last night they moved a girl in," the activist reported.

Varvara Luch also indicated in her message that she had disabled comments on her post to prevent provocations, stating that "everything is fine now."

* The LGBT movement is recognized as an extremist organization in the Russian Federation.

** is included in the Russian register of foreign agents.

*** Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) is banned in Russia.