Biography
After a wave of searches in Yoshkar-Ola in the spring of 2022, Denis Petrov turned out to be one of 9 men against whom the FSB initiated a criminal case for practicing the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Denis was born in 2001 in Yoshkar-Ola. As a child, he went in for swimming and studied at a music school, playing the violin and piano. After school, he entered the Volga State Technological University to study software engineering. During the first year, Denis began working as a programmer, which he continues to do to this day. He plans to set up his own IT company. In his free time he likes to play sports.
From a young age, Denis was fascinated by the way the Bible describes the world. He fell in love with this book and found answers to many life questions in it. Still being young, Denis made the decision to become one of Jehovah's Witnesses.
His parents and grandmother worry about Denis; they support him and assure him of their love.
Case History
In April 2022, the FSB initiated a criminal case against Jehovah’s Witnesses from Yoshkar-Ola. Searches were conducted at nine addresses, and law enforcement officers used force against one of the believers, Yevgeniy Plotnikov. He was detained and subsequently placed in a pretrial detention center. In August 2022, Yevgeniy was transferred to house arrest, and in October, he was placed under a ban on certain actions. In December of the same year, the FSB investigator began charging other residents of the city: Sergey Kulikov and his son Aleksey, Eduard Kapitonov and his son Ilya, Igor Alekseyev, Vladimir Usenko, Denis Petrov, Ilya Buryi and Sergey Naymushin. The investigator regarded practicing their faith as actions of an extremist nature and placed them under a recognizance agreement. In October 2024, the case went to court, 3 months later the prosecutor requested 9 years in a penal colony for the believers, and in February of the same year, the court sentenced them to fines: Plotnikov 500,000 rubles, and the rest 600,000 rubles.
