The criminal case against the neo-Nazi group "OB-418" (ОБ-418), whose members had been convicted in 2012, has undergone new developments these months as its leader was sentenced by the Nizhny Novgorod regional court.

The neo-Nazi organization's eight members, active in the Nizhny Novgorod region from 2010 to 2012, were all between 17 and 20 years old at the time when they were arrested in March 2012, except for their supposed leader, Dmitry Kuznetsov, who was then 22.

“OB-418” was a typical Nazi skinhead organization. According to the investigators, it had a clear structure and its own symbols, based on the swastika, the Celtic cross and the Kolovrat (a Slavic pagan solar symbol). Its members wore heavy boots and bomber jackets, shaved their heads, and were required to get tattoos representing the movement's symbols.

The number “418” can be broken down into 4 (supposedly representing “Hitler's four companions”), 1 (which stands for the letter A in the Latin alphabet, and thus for “Adolf”) and 8 (which stands for the letter H like “Hitler”). As for the letters “OB”, different versions can be found: they stand either for “association of skinheads” (obshchestvo britogolovykh) or for “the whites association” (obshchestvo belykh).

The aim of the movement was to attack people of “non-Slavic” appearance, especially migrants from the near abroad, and people belonging to other informal movements such as punks and anti-fascists. In short, members of “OB-418” attacked people who, according to their views, “should not live in Russia”. They also actively promoted the ideas of fascism on their website and on social networks.

The young men arrested in 2012 were judged for five such attacks against Armenian natives, punks, but also some of their peers who had “walked away from the Nazi ideology”, and were thus considered as traitors. The beatings took place in Nizhny Novgorod and in surrounding towns, such as Semyonov, where the supposed leader of the band Kuznetsov beat a drug addict he accused of “dishonoring the white race”, for instance.

The movement's members were convicted in December 2012 under Parts 1 and 2 of Article 282.1 of the Criminal Code (creation of an extremist association and participation in its activities), under Part 2 of Article 112 (intentional infliction of injury of average gravity by reason of ethnic and ideological hatred), and under Part 2 of Article 116 (battery for motives of ethnic and ideological hatred). The Semyonov court sentenced them to two to five and a half years of imprisonment.

The criminal case should have stopped there, but the prosecutor's office recently found out that the real organizer of the movement was not Kuznetsov, as was thought in 2012, but another man who had managed to escape judgement.

This 24-year-old man was condemned in February 2014 to seven months of corrective work for having published four videos on the website “VKontakte”, inciting to ethnic discord and hatred towards natives of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Investigators then discovered that it was precisely this man who led the organization “OB-418”. In March, they initiated another criminal case against him on these grounds. He was thus found guilty under Part 1 of Article 282.1 of the Criminal Code, and sentenced to three years of imprisonment in a penal colony. The accused and his lawyer appealed the court's decision, but the Nizhny Novgorod regional court decided to maintain the sentence so it has come into force this month.