Court Fined 10 Jehovah's Witnesses from Yoshkar-Ola for "Convening and Participating in Meetings"

On February 13, 2025, Judge Andrey Nebogatikov of the Yoshkar-Ola City Court sentenced local believers to fines of 600,000 rubles for meetings for worship. One of them, Yevgeniy Plotnikov, 42, had his fine reduced to 500,000 rubles, considering the time he had spent in detention.

It took the court 4 months to find veteran of labor Eduard Kapitonov and his son Ilya, Sergey Kulikov and his son Aleksey, Igor Alekseyev, Vladimir Usenko, Denis Petrov, Ilya Buryi, Sergey Naymushin and Yevgeniy Plotnikov extremists. According to the prosecutor, the element of the crime consists of being organised in meetings for worship and participating in them. Based on this, the prosecution concluded that the men had recreated a legal entity liquidated by the court. The verdict has not entered into force and can be appealed at the appellate instance. The believers pleaded not guilty.

In his final statement, Yevgeniy Plotnikov emphasized: "The state prosecution demands harsh terms for us — 9 years in a penal colony. To tell the truth, such terms are not even requested for or given to real criminals, murderers and repeat offenders... The main mistake of the prosecution is not looking for extremism in my actions, otherwise all the charges would have been dropped long ago at the investigation stage, as there is no extremism. The prosecution only proves that I am a Jehovah's Witness, simply a believer, which I have never denied."

The local FSB Directorate conducted the investigation for 2.5 years, during which time the number of defendants increased from one to ten. The youngest of them, Ilya Kapitonov, is 23; the oldest, Sergey Kulikov, is 71. Sergey's wife developed a malignant tumor due to the stress, and as a result one of her kidneys had to be removed. His son Alexey, father of five, developed hypertension. The property of Eduard Kapitonov, 59, was seized.

Yevgeniy Plotnikov's lawyer said in his closing arguments: "The position of the prosecution, which actually requires believers to practice their religion [chaotically] under the threat [of punishment], is nothing other than the authorities attempting to force Jehovah's Witnesses to renounce their faith."

The right of Jehovah's Witnesses to worship in an organized manner was mentioned back in 2021 in the response of the RF Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Irina Yakku, wife of one of the convicted Jehovah's Witnesses from Arkhangelsk: "Members of a liquidated organization can independently practice a religious cult, including as part of religious groups that do not require registration, on the understanding that this is not related to carrying out extremist activity."