The organizer of the Bi-2 concerts told how artists were deported from Thailand
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Concert organizer “Bi-2” Maxim Volkov in conversation with RBC talked about how the musicians left Thailand. According to him, the decision to deport the artists to Israel was made on the morning of January 31 after a meeting at the Thai Foreign Ministry, at which the country’s authorities decided not to extradite the Bi-2 participants to Russia.
Mr. Volkov also said that the musicians were kept “with addiction” in the migration prison. “Yes, this is a standard procedure, but this standard procedure has nuances, and these nuances play the main role: you can put people in a closed cell, you can put them in an open cell, you can put them in a cell with 80 people, you can put them in a cell with 10. <...> We heard everywhere that they were calling from the Russian consulate and were interested in the case from the point of view of control, and not from the point of view of somehow completing it,” the organizer told RBC reporters.
Maxim Volkov noted that in the first days after the arrest, representatives of the Israeli and Australian consulates tried to help the Bi-2 participants, but the Russian consul “did not take a single step.” According to the organizer, initially “the highest officials of Thailand” were not aware of the situation, but after its publicity “they immediately resolved the problem”, since the lack of “the scale of the violation” was “obvious.”
The Bi-2 participants were detained on January 24 immediately after their performance in Phuket. The court sentenced the musicians to a fine of $95 for holding a concert without permission. They were later placed in a detention center in Bangkok. On January 30, a message was published on the Bi-2 Telegram channel saying that the group members “refused to communicate with the Russian consul.” On the same day, the founder of the group, Egor Bortnik (Leva “Bi-2”; included in the register of foreign agents by the Ministry of Justice), was deported to Israel. On January 31, all other participants were released from the temporary detention center.
Read more in the Kommersant FM article. “Foreign agent artists are looking for the “hand of the Kremlin””.
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