Two Russian activists have been arrested after breaking into and occupying a luxury villa in Biarritz owned by Vladimir Putin’s former son-in-law., of the Svoboda Liberté Association, whose blog appears on the Mediapart news website, and Sergey Saveliev entered the eight-bedroom Alta Mira property in the French coastal resort, popular with Russian oligarchs. They announced on social media that they had changed the locks and 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 younger 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 an upper-floor balcony with a Ukrainian flag.
Haffner, who said he was renaming the property “Villa Ukraine”, said he would ask human rights activists and lawyers to ask Biarritz city hall and the police prefecture to use it to house refugees fromFrench police later broke down the door, arrested the two activists and were now holding them in custody.
The exiled Russian dissident Vladimir Osechkin, founder of a human rights group that has exposed alleged rape and abuse in Russian prisons and who is on Russia’s most-wanted register, told the Guardian: “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. They had asked me to buy some sheets and linen for people to stay there.