Belarus has extradited a Russian man who was separated from his daughter and sentenced to two years in prison after she drew anti-war pictures at school.
Alexei Moskalyov, a 54-year-old single parent from the town of Yefremov, 150 miles south of Moscow, fled house arrest last month, hours before a court handed him a two-year sentence for “discrediting” the Russian army.
He was detained two days later in neighbouring Belarus, most likely as a result of turning on his mobile phone and giving away his location.
The high-profile case was criticised by Russian human rights groups and led to an online campaign to reunite father and daughter.
“Alexei Moskalyov was extradited from Belarus to Russia,” the OVD-Info rights group said, citing his lawyer in Belarus.
Moskalyov said his family first faced pressure from police last April when his daughter, Maria Moskalyova, 13, refused to participate in a patriotic class at her school and made several drawings showing rockets being fired at a family standing under a Ukrainian flag and another that read “Glory to Ukraine”.
School officials at the time summoned the police, who questioned the girl and threatened her father.
Police then began examining Moskalyov’s social media activity and the father was eventually charged with discrediting the armed forces for his posts in which he called the Russian regime “terrorists” and described the Russian army as “rapists”. Moskalyov’s daughter was placed in a children’s shelter shortly after his arrest.
Last week, the Kremlin children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, said Moskalyov’s daughter had been picked up from the orphanage by her mother.
The child had previously refused to live with her mother but changed her mind, and the mother took her home, Lvova-Belova claimed.
The international criminal court is seeking to arrest Lvova-Belova along with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for war crimes for allegedly deporting children from Ukraine.
Moskalyov, who is likely to spend the next two years in a Russian jail, is also at risk of losing parental rights in a separate trial.
