A worker takes a selfie before removing a Ukrainian flag from atop a skyscraper in Moscow, on August 20th. PHOTOGRAPH BY ILYA VARLAMOV/AP

Something odd happened in a Moscow court on Thursday: four people were acquitted. Just how odd was this? Last year, Russian judges acquitted only four out of every thousand defendants that appeared before them. The lucky anomalies were two men and two women, aged between twenty-six and thirty-four, all of them urban skydiving enthusiasts. The court also sentenced a twenty-three-year-old roof climber to two years and three months behind bars.

All five of the defendants have been listed as political prisoners by the leading Russian human rights organization, Memorial. This makes the four acquittals all the more remarkable: they would appear, at first glance, to run counter to the well-observed tendency of Russian courts to sentence political prisoners consistently, swiftly, and harshly. But examined closely, the case yields some instructive insights into the functioning of the Russian judiciary.

The case began on the morning of August 20, 2014, when commuters in central Moscow noticed that the top half of the five-pointed star atop the spire atop one of the tallest buildings in the city had been painted blue. Combined with the native yellow of the spire, this rendered the star the colors of the Ukrainian flag. To drive the point home, an actual Ukrainian flag had been planted atop the star.

Within a day, four skydivers were apprehended. A week later, two roof-climbers were detained. A third one, a Ukrainian who uses the nickname Grisha Mustang, publicly took credit for the stunt, but he was in Ukraine, so the court ruled to arrest him in absentia (he subsequently changed his nom de escalade to Grisha Mustang Wanted). The prosecution claimed that the two Russian roof-climbers – urban athletes who specialize in clambering to the tops of high-rises – showed Mustang how to scale the Moscow building and then, after he did his painting and his flag-planting, the four skydivers jumped off the building to draw attention to its new Ukrainian colors. The divers and the climbers were charged with “vandalism and hooliganism aimed to destabilize the situation in Moscow and provoke hatred.”

Hooliganism, under Russian law, is a “crude disruption of the social order” that is punishable particularly harshly—by up to seven years’ incarceration—if either violence or hatred is involved. Members of the protest art group Pussy Riot, for example, were convicted of hooliganism on the basis of religious enmity; they were said to have danced and sung in church because they hated Russian Orthodox believers. Other Russian political protesters have also been accused of hooliganism. Vandalism is a less frequently applied charge. The law defines it as the desecration, or defilement, of property, and it is also punished more harshly—by up to three years behind bars—if it is motivated by hatred.

One of the Russian roof-climbers was apparently carrying illegal drugs when he was detained. He cut a deal with the prosecution, whereby he would get a lighter sentence for the drug charge in exchange for testifying on the hooliganism and vandalism. All of this was standard fare for Russian political trials, as were the defendants’ claims, made in court, that they had been threatened and pressured by investigators. In the end, a consistent picture emerged: the two Russian roof-climbers had shown Mustang the way to the roof, which he then decorated as he intended. That the skydivers jumped off the building the same day was pure coincidence. The skydivers pleaded not guilty, and the one roof climber facing trial, Vladimir Podrezov, pleaded “guilty in part.”

“I was there, next to that person,” Podrezov told the court, referring to Mustang. “Through my inaction, I sort of didn’t get in his way. I didn’t call the police. So the paint was applied and the architectural monument was defaced.” But Podrezov was not accused of defacing an architectural monument: he was accused of defiling property, and this raises the question of what kind of property in Russia is holy enough to be protected by hate-crimes statutes. The Stalinist high-rise is one of seven iconic, nearly identical buildings erected in Moscow after the Second World War. They symbolize the Soviet Union’s postwar superpower status and, more generally, Stalinist achievement (the buildings, however, bear an uncanny resemblance to the much older Manhattan Municipal Building). Legend has it that German prisoners of war were used as construction workers, though it appears that gulag inmates of different nationalities labored to erect the giants. Smaller copies of the buildings were placed in several capitals of Soviet republics and satellite states, where they were perceived as symbols of Soviet domination. Mustang chose his object well: planting a Ukrainian flag on one of the Stalinist high-rises is as close as one might get, in twenty-first-century Europe, to planting a flag on an enemy fortress.

The prosecution never made it clear exactly what kind of hatred ostensibly motivated the accused hooligans and vandals. It portrayed Mustang Wanted, though, as a Ukrainian right-wing extremist, so it would follow—if one followed the logic of Russian media coverage of the war in Ukraine—that the defendants hated Russians. The prosecution asked for three-year sentences for all five defendants; all had been under house arrest for the year leading up to the trial.

But then the judge acquitted the skydivers and deemed Podrezov a vandal but not a hooligan, sentencing him to time in a prison colony. The acquittals surprised observers who have come to think of Russia as a lawless tyranny. But the court acted in the service not of a tyranny but of a totalitarian state—in accordance with a warped but clear concept of law. In a totalitarian state, climbing up to the roof of a building with someone who will plant the flag of a neighboring country can be a political crime punishable by hard labor—like dancing and singing in a church can be. A Western court is likely to have punished the skydivers more harshly than the climbers: in North America, urban skydivers (also known as BASE jumpers) often face charges of trespassing and endangerment. The Moscow court, however, protects the political order rather than the social one—and by acquitting the skydivers, it demonstrated that it can tell the difference.