Updated: March 18, 2024
Name: Rayman Valeriya Aleksandrovna
Date of Birth: May 21, 1993
Current status: who has served the main sentence
Articles of Criminal Code of Russian Federation: 282.2 (1), 282.2 (2)
Time spent in prison: 2 day in a temporary detention facility
Sentence: punishment in the form of 6 years 6 months of imprisonment with restriction of liberty for 1 year, with deprivation of the right to engage in activities related to leadership and participation in the work of religious organizations for a term of 1 year 6 months, punishment in the form of imprisonment shall be considered conditional with a probationary period of 2 years

Biography

In July 2018, security forces, accompanied by riot police, using crowbars, broke into the apartment of Valeriya and her husband Sergey with television cameras. The young couple learned that a criminal case was opened against them for their faith. Both were detained, Sergey was sent to a pre-trial detention center for 2 months, and Valeriya, after 2 days in an isolation ward, was placed under house arrest. After the investigation, the return of the case to the prosecutor and court proceedings in October 2020, Sergey and Valeriya were sentenced to 8 and 7 years of probation, respectively, but on February 26, 2021, the Kostroma Regional Court reduced the terms to 3 and 2 years probation.

Valeriya was born in May 1993. When she was only 10 years old, her father died. Since childhood, she studied music, played the violin and studied vocals. As a teenager, she graduated from the courses of a stylist-make-up artist, and after school she studied at the college as a hairdresser. He loves stove, is fond of making interior items from concrete.

Mom raised her daughter on stories from the Bible, and Valeriya loved this wise book. “It helped me grow up to be a decent, responsible and honest person,” she says.

In 2015, Valeriya married Sergey and they settled in Kostroma. The criminal prosecution had a profound effect on the spouses' emotional and physical well-being. Valeriya notes: “For more than two years now we have been living under constant stress and anxiety. And all this is due to the unfair accusation of extremism. "

Case History

In July 2018, the life of young spouses Sergey and Valeria Rayman was divided into “before” and “after”. They were accused of extremism under two articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation for participating in worship services. The Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee for the Kostroma Region investigated the case for 1.5 years. During this time, the couple survived imprisonment in solitary confinement, a ban on correspondence and reading the Bible, house arrest, and a restriction on communication even with each other. In August 2019, the court began considering their case, but 1.5 months later returned it to the prosecutor for the unfounded accusation. After re-examining the case, the court sentenced Sergey and Valeriya to 8 and 7 years of probation, respectively. In February 2021, the regional court reduced the terms to 3 and 2 years, but the cassation returned the case to the appeal stage. Based on the results of the reconsideration in the regional court, Part 2 of Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation was excluded from the verdict and the spouses were given 7 and 6.5 years suspended with a probationary period of 2 years. In August 2022, the cassation court finally approved this decision.