Criminal defence in Russia
Yalanzhi & Partners is a Moscow-based criminal defence practice. This site is our English-language practice for foreign nationals facing criminal proceedings in the Russian Federation.
All Russia
Cases taken across the Russian regions
9
Advocates and criminal lawyers
registration numbers published
24/7
Enquiries answered
detention does not wait for office hours
English
Correspondence and case updates
interpreter free in the case itself
Free
First assessment of the case
Art. 8
Legal privilege from the first contact
Federal Law on Advocacy
We defend criminal cases. Not commercial litigation, not immigration advice as a standalone service, not family law — criminal defence, at every stage from the first detention to an application for early release years into a sentence.
Our clients in this practice are foreign nationals detained, charged or convicted in Russia, and the people instructing us on their behalf: parents, spouses, employers, and sometimes consular officers who have been asked for a list of local lawyers.
The firm is a team of advocates and criminal lawyers, most of them working within a defined area — drug offences, economic crime, violent crime, appeals and cassation, the penal system. Advocates hold registration numbers in the regional bar chambers, and those numbers are published on each individual page. You can verify them.
That verification matters more than it might seem. In Russia the title of advocate is a regulated professional status, conferred after qualification and entry in the regional register, and it carries obligations that an unlicensed legal consultant does not have — including legal professional privilege under Article 8 of the Federal Law on Advocacy, and the right of unrestricted access to a client held in a detention centre.
Correspondence with families, written case updates and consultations are conducted in English. Some of our lawyers speak English and work with clients directly; others work through an interpreter, who is in any event compulsory and free of charge in the proceedings themselves.
We would rather state this plainly than imply that everyone here is fluent. What decides a case is not the language the lawyer speaks to you in. It is whether they can defend it in a Russian court.
We will not promise an outcome. We will not tell a family that a case can be "resolved" through channels other than the legal process — anyone who suggests that to you is either committing an offence or defrauding you, and frequently both. And we will not take a case we do not think we can add anything to; where the honest answer is that a further appeal has no prospects and the realistic step is an application for parole, we say so.
Our Russian-language site is нуженадвокат.рф. It serves a different audience with different material and is not a translation of this one.
