[2] As of May 2012, he was a fourth-year student in the Faculty of Political Science at Moscow State University and a member of the Russian Citizens Union, a national democratic movement.
[8] Gazeta reported on July 4, 2012, that the Basmanny court had extended the incarceration of Belousov and three other protesters, Maxim Lusyanin, Andrei Barabanov, and Fedor Backhov.
In December 2013, “an international panel of experts on freedom of assembly published a report that found that although there were individual violent episodes” that had taken place in Bolotnaya Square, they did not constitute a 'mass riot'.
There are no videos or still images of the object striking anyone….Videos taken from another angle (and posted on the web) clearly show Belousov tossing the remains of the crushed tangerine or lemon he had bent down to retrieve.”[10] While the defense said that the item in question was a lemon, and that the policeman who claimed to have been harmed by the projectile had departed from the scene before it was thrown, prosecutors argued that the object in question had been a billiard ball.
On June 9, 2013, the New York Times cited Agranovsky's view that “the lengthy pretrial detention of most of the defendants was proof of the political nature of the charges,” and quoted him as stating that it was unusual the government detained the suspects were held for a year without bail, despite no previous arrest record for any of them.
[1] Agranovsky further told the Times that the charges against Belousov were based entirely on one officer's testimony who claimed to be struck in the chest by a "yellow object".
The Bolotnaya trial has not exposed orchestrated violence, but rather a criminal justice system that is entirely malleable to the dictates of its political masters."
The judge maintained, however, that defense witnesses’ testimony had “not refuted the overflowing of the events into mass riots and have not refuted the proof of participation of the defendants in the riots.”[12] Outside the court, protesters held a banner reading: “You Can’t Jail Everybody.”[12] As the judge read the sentences for Belousov and his fellow defendants, according to one source, "chants of ‘Shame!’" entered the court.
Agranovsky told a reporter that the harsh punishment meted out to his client was, in his view, “in part a Kremlin reaction to the upheaval in neighbouring Ukraine.”[7] At the sentencing, about 200 persons, among them two previously incarcerated members of the punk band Pussy Riot, were briefly detained by police outside the court.
The State Department claimed that they had been unlawfully detained for over a year on politically-motivated charges, calling it "another example of punishment of Russians for exercising their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech and assembly.
"[14] On February 27, 2014, the co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the House of Representatives of the United States, Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Frank Wolf (R-VA), expressed “grave concern over the mass detentions of peaceful protesters” who had taken to the streets “to protest the sentences handed down in the cases of eight participants of the Bolotnaya Square demonstrations,” including Belousov.
The Lantos Commission described the trials as having been “marked by a lack of due process” and as “widely recognized as politically-motivated,” and urged the Russian government “to address these recent instances of blatant injustice.”[15] Belousov and his wife, Tamara Belousova, were married in 2010.