Lapshin Provides Details on Incident with Police

After yesterday's report regarding the potential bribery attempt by police in Berd, Armenia, I received numerous responses. Even police friends from Yerevan wrote to me, confirming that according to the law on police, an officer is not authorized to take a driver's license as a "bail" and that this is purely arbitrary behavior of the police. Moreover, upon studying the law regarding police in Armenia, I found not a single word about "bail." This was stated by Russian blogger Alexander Lapshin on his Facebook page.

“Moreover, my police friends wrote to me that the officer starts the conversation with words like: ‘You don’t have a technical inspection; how will we resolve this?’ - which already exceeds the limits permitted by regulations. Furthermore, according to the law, the penalty for not having a technical inspection is imposed solely on the vehicle owner, not the driver. It turns out that from the very beginning, the police violated the law,” he wrote.

Last night, sitting with my Armenian friends who went to Berd with me at a café in Yerevan, we recalled and discussed this unpleasant situation with the police. They remembered a few suspicious moments that we hadn’t initially considered:

1. When I was watching footage from Berd (before they stopped us), their patrol car with number 2260 came into the frame. They had parked on the main street of Berd.
2. Later, when I was walking through Berd filming a video about this city, the police appeared again in the background of my shot, looking at me and clearly discussing us. Only later, upon closer inspection of the video, did I notice this.
3. My friend, blogger Harutyun Hakobyan, recalled that he even approached these officers to ask if there was a café in Berd, and they replied that they weren’t locals and didn’t know.
4. This suggests that these two officers had seen us in Berd two hours before the incident on the highway and decided that we were some “local Russians,” perhaps IT professionals with high salaries who did not know the laws of Armenia. It is no secret that all of Armenia is convinced that all these tens of thousands of Russians who have arrived are merely IT professionals and at least millionaires.
5. Then, possibly seeing an unusually “Alfa Romeo” car for Armenia that we arrived in, the police, judging by our Armenian plates, decided that we had come directly from Russia, simply changing the numbers. They returned to their patrol car and checked our car through their database, likely finding that the vehicle owner was slightly overdue on their inspection by a year.
6. In Berd, the police were afraid to approach us as there were cameras everywhere; catching us on the deserted highway outside the city was safer. They stubbornly waited for us for two hours while we walked around, filmed, and had coffee at the café.
7. When we finished walking in Berd, returned to our car, and left, the police immediately jumped into their vehicle and slowly drove after us. I noticed them in the rearview mirror at that moment. They then followed us for about 10 kilometers until we passed a large village in Tavush, where there could have been many people, and ended up on a deserted road. After that, the police turned on their lights and demanded that we stop the car.

The police had no legal grounds to fine me for not having a technical inspection (since I am not the vehicle owner) and, even more so, had no right to confiscate my driver’s license. All of this is absolutely illegal.