A Court in Taiga Sentenced Two Jehovah's Witnesses to Three Years in Prison, but Considered the Term Already Served. Yuriy Usanov and Maksim Morozov Are Free

On August 15, 2023, Tatyana Kovaleva, Judge of the Taiga City Court of the Kemerovo Region, sentenced Yuriy Usanov and Maksim Morozov to three years in prison for their faith. But since the term is considered to have already been served in the pre-trial detention center, the believers were released. More than sixty listeners, who were admitted to the courtroom reacted to the decision with applause.

Believers faced persecution on religious grounds in early April 2021, when the Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Kemerovo Region—Kuzbass initiated a criminal case against Yuriy Usanov, accusing him of holding meetings of believers via video conferencing. After the searches that took place the next day, Usanov was detained and put in a pre-trial detention center. After four months, Maksim Morozov was also put behind bars. According to him, as proof of their "involvement in extremism," the investigation provided them with video recordings of meetings at which the Bible was discussed and prayers to God were heard.

Usanov spent more than two years behind bars, Morozov - two years and nine days. The last nine months before the verdict, Yuriy Usanov was in solitary confinement. Usanov had a wedding scheduled for July 2021, and  it had to be held in an isolation ward . Employees of the Anzhero-Sudzhensk pre-trial detention center said that such a thing “has never been seen here before.” The administration of the pre-trial detention center gave the newlyweds five minutes to communicate after registering the marriage, after which Yuriy's wife, Irina, did not receive visits from her husband for about a year.

After almost a year of preliminary investigation, the case went to court. Falsifications were revealed at the hearings: the testimony of two prosecution witnesses was identical, up to spelling errors; another woman stated that words she had not said appeared in the record of her interrogation. In court, she described the believers as kind, humble, and patient people. Despite this, the prosecutor requested five years and two months in prison and seven months of additional restrictions for Usanov, 31, and Morozov, 40. The verdict passed by the court has not entered into force and can be appealed.

A few days before the verdict was passed, the state prosecutor reclassified the charge as participation in the activities of an extremist organization, having found no confirmation of actions of an "organizational nature." This contributed to the mitigation of punishment and the speedy release of believers.

The court found Morozov and Usanov guilty of committing a crime under Part 2 of Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and imposed a sentence of imprisonment for three years with additional restriction of liberty for six months (not to change the place of residence or stay without the consent of a specialized state body exercising supervision, and also not to travel outside the territory of the city district without his consent—for Usanov of the Taiga urban district,  for Morozov—Tolyatti city district). The believers were credited with the period of detention at the rate of one day for one and a-half-days.

To date, nineteen Jehovah's Witnesses, including three women, have been subjected to religious repression in the Kemerovo Region. Recently, a harsh sentence was passed against a believer with a disability, Andrey Vlasov. In prison conditions, his illness progresses rapidly. According to the law, he cannot be detained.

The world community and the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation stated that "the joint performance of rites and ceremonies [of Jehovah's Witnesses] does not in itself constitute a crime under Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, despite the liquidation of their legal entities."