Today, at the court in Chita over the custody extension of Platon Lebedev, he made the following statement at the end of his plea:

I do not know how to help Aleksanyan while locked up in a cell but I’m prepared to repudiate my defence lawyers if it helps Aleksanyan in any way. I ask prosecutor Zhukova to tell Aleksanyan that he can and is entitled to (in the current situation) to testify against me so that this torture will end and so that he may stay alive.

Comment from Platon Lebedev’s lawyer, Elena Liptser: Media have wrongly interpreted Platon Leonidovich’s words to mean that he was expressing readiness to confess to the Prosecutor General’s accusations against him. This is not the case. The accusations were, and remain, an outrageous manifestation of ordered prosecution. But in a life-and-death situation such as this you have to make a decision; the authorities make theirs. Platon Leonidovich’s stance is now clear.