Two Russian activists were arrested after breaking into and occupying a luxury villa in Biarritz, a property of Vladimir Putin's ex-son-in-law.
Pierre Haffner, of the Svoboda Liberté Association, whose blog is featured on the news website Mediapart, and Sergey Saveliev entered the eight-room Alta Mira property in the French coastal resort, popular with Russian oligarchs.
On their social media accounts they announced that they had changed the locks and that they would offer it to house Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war.
The property is said to belong to Kirill Shamalov, a Russian billionaire and former husband of Putin's youngest daughter, Katerina Tikhonova. Haffner and Saveliev claimed to have found one of Shamalov's passports and a translation of a Moscow electricity bill.
A photograph posted on social media shows one of the activists on a balcony on the top floor with a Ukrainian flag.
Haffner, who said he would change the name of the property to “Villa Ukraine”, called on human rights activists and lawyers to ask Biarritz city hall and the police prefecture to use the mansion to house refugees from Ukraine.
The French police subsequently broke down the door, arrested the two activists and now kept them in custody.
“This isn't fair. This isn't justice... My friends were not doing any damage to this property, they were preparing it so that refugees from the war in Ukraine, including children, could stay there. That's all they were doing. I had been asked to buy some sheets and bedding so that people would stay there,” exiled Russian dissident Vladimir Osechkin, founder of a human rights group that has exposed alleged violations and abuses in Russian prisons and is listed on the registry of Russia's most wanted, told the Guardian.
On Facebook, Osechkin wrote: “In Europe, Putin's family and his oligarch accomplices bought hundreds of villas. Their luxurious bourgeois life has come to a logical end, because war crimes and crimes of the regime will have to pay... Now it's not about glamorous parties and villa parties. It is important to be responsible and fair in the 21st century. We continue. Stop the war.”
It is still unknown what happened to the activists after their arrest and whether they are still in the custody of the authorities.
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