A Nizhny Novgorod Court Handed Kirill Yevstigneyev a Three-Year Suspended Sentence for Believing in God

On May 12, 2022, Viktor Ushakov, judge of the Leninskiy District Court of Nizhny Novgorod, found 42-year-old Kirill Yevstigneev guilty of financing the activities of an extremist organization and sentenced him to 3 years of suspended sentence. The believer can appeal the verdict.

“I am in the dock not because I committed some real crime and therefore dangerous to society. I am being prosecuted just for being a Christian, for being a Jehovah's Witness. Do we live during the medieval Inquisition, when people were persecuted just because they read the Bible?” — asked the defendant rhetorically, addressing the court with the last word.

Yevstigneev resolutely denied the guilt of extremism and asked the court to justify his good name, but the judge delivered a guilty verdict, although he did not satisfy the prosecutor's request to send the believer to a colony for 6 years.

In the summer of 2019, in Nizhny Novgorod and the nearby town of Pavlovo, houses of Jehovah's Witnesses were searched extensively. After them, law enforcement officers began one after another to initiate criminal cases against believers. Now there are already 9 criminal cases against 16 Jehovah's Witnesses in the region. The Yevstigneev case is one of them.

Kirill Yevstigneev was included in the list of terrorists and extremists of Rosfinmonitoring. All his bank accounts were blocked, and his travel ban limited his ability to move.

The believer was accused of “financing an extremist organization,” because, according to the investigation, he “signed a lease agreement for non-residential premises . . . and made payment under this agreement in the amount of 7,500 rubles.” The believers rented this room for friendly events, the video of one of them was later shown in court. The footage shows how during the 6-hour meeting people communicated, performed musical performances, including those based on plots from well-known and loved by many Soviet films, sang songs and danced to secular music. How these actions are connected with extremism, a crime against the foundations of security and the constitutional order, neither the investigation nor the prosecutor explained.

The ECtHR, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention are just some of the organizations condemning the repression of Jehovah's Witnesses.