Russian mathematician Mikhail Verbitsky has been detained at the Yerevan airport, writer Roman Leibov and the independent Russian broadcaster TV Rain reported.
Leibov wrote that Verbitsky had been detained at Russia’s request. On advice from Verbitsky’s lawyer, he asked readers to share the information as widely as possible.
TV Rain said police at the Yerevan airport precinct confirmed that Verbitsky, who was on a wanted list in Russia, had been detained. A police officer said the mathematician was being held in a detention center in Yerevan.
Ani Chatinyan, a lawyer at the Yerevan office of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly “Vanadzor,” said Verbitsky was detained over a criminal case opened against him in Russia. She explained that if Russia submitted an extradition request, Verbitsky would be held for 40 days under Armenian law; otherwise, he would be released within 72 hours.
In January 2025, Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) added Verbitsky to its list of terrorists and extremists. He appeared on the list with an asterisk, indicating that a criminal case had been opened against him on a terrorism-related charge. The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, citing sources, reported that Verbitsky had become a defendant in a criminal case involving calls to terrorism.
Verbitsky told the independent Russian outlet Holod in an interview that he left Russia in 2015 and now lives in Rio de Janeiro, where he holds a professorship at the National Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics.
Verbitsky worked at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow and taught at the Higher School of Economics, the University of Glasgow, and the Free University of Brussels. He is known as a blogger and the creator of “Tifaretnik” — a platform similar to LiveJournal. In his blogs, he described himself as a “communist,” “anarchist,” and “Satanist”; in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was a supporter of the “Russian world” concept and the National Bolshevik Party.
In 2014, Verbitsky was a witness in the criminal case against essayist Boris Stomakhin, who was accused of inciting religious hatred, advocating extremism, and justifying terrorism.
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