Police in Moscow arrested Yekaterinburg resident Dmitry Bakhtin on Monday after he staged a one-man protest on Red Square in an effort to convince the Russian authorities to provide lifesaving medication to his three-year-old son, according to the news outlet Sota. A journalist from Sota who was covering the protest was arrested as well.
Bakhtin has been arrested multiple times in the past for protesting, including on Red Square. Bakhtin’s son, Misha, suffers from spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), and the medication he requires, risdiplam, is one of the most expensive medications in the world. Bakhtin has previously said that a year’s worth of the medicine costs 14 million rubles (about $140,000).
And then you have certain instances on here that will swarm threads with the asinine claim that places like Russia and China are the really free ones and it’s really Western countries that are totalitarian.
Like, no shit, every country has done/still does awful stuff sometimes, but I’m gonna go with the ones literally arresting people for expressing an opinion are the less free ones.