A Russian mathematician detained at the Yerevan airport on June 12 was released from custody, his attorney Vache Simonyan told RFE/RL’s Russian service. Simonyan said Mikhail Verbitsky was released because Russia had not submitted a formal extradition request to the Armenian prosecutor’s office.
Verbitsky, who has a ticket to Israel, cannot leave Armenia — a restriction his attorney said was connected to the charges filed against him in Russia.
“I was arrested right at the airport, handcuffed, and taken to a pretrial detention facility,” Verbitsky told RFE/RL. “At first they told me nothing; then they said they would transfer me to Russia. I was arrested because Russia is looking for me. I knew that, but I didn’t think I would be arrested if I came to Armenia.”
Russian authorities have listed Verbitsky as a terrorist and extremist in the Rosfinmonitoring register — Russia’s financial intelligence blacklist — since January 2025. According to Verbitsky’s wife, Yulia Fridman, Russian authorities have opened two criminal cases against him — one for “discrediting” the military and another for “justifying terrorism.” The terrorism case, she said, arose because he had questioned the methods used to investigate the attack at Crocus City Hall.
Mikhail Verbitsky worked at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow and taught mathematics at HSE University, the University of Glasgow, and the Free University of Brussels. He is also a blogger and creator of Tifaretnik — a platform similar to LiveJournal. In an interview with the Russian news outlet Holod, he said that he left Russia in 2015 and lives in Rio de Janeiro, where he is a professor at the National Institute of Mathematics.
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