A court in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in the Urals has fined and ordered the deportation of a Belarusian man for an attempt to set a monument to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin on fire.
The Interior Ministry's Main Directorate for the Sverdlovsk region says that a local court fined the 31-year-old man 2,000 rubles ($33) on November 9 before ordering him to be deported to Belarus.
Belarusian media identified the man as Ihar Shchuka, a member of the ultraleftist party The Other Russia, which is led by firebrand Russian writer and politician Eduard Limonov.
Shchuka was arrested on November 7 -- the day when Russian Communists and leftist groups marked the centennial anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution -- after throwing a Molotov cocktail at Yeltsin's monument in the late president’s native city of Yekaterinburg.
The group's 23 members had previously been detained by police on November 6 in St. Petersburg after they rallied against capitalism on the eve of the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Limonov formed the unregistered party under the name The Other Russia in 2010 after his National Bolshevik Party was outlawed.
The National Bolshevik Party had been part of an opposition coalition that was also called The Other Russia and included liberal Kremlin opponents, but the name now refers only to Limonov's organization.
