The Court of Appeal in Perm Upheld the Verdict Against 5 Believers. Conditional Terms From 2.5 to 7 Years Were Approved

On August 23, 2021, the Perm Regional Court rejected the appeal of five Jehovah's Witnesses. Boris Burylov, Viktor Kuchkov, Alexandr Inozemtsev and Yuriy Vaag were found guilty of participation, and Igor Turik was found guilty of organizing and financing extremist activities. The sentence imposed by the court of first instance has not changed.

In May 2021, the judge of the Industrial District Court of Perm, Viktor Podyniglazov, sentenced Igor Turik to 7 years of suspended imprisonment with a probationary period of 4 years; Boris Burylov, Viktor Kuchkov, Alexandr Inozemtsev and Yuriy Vaag received 2.5 years of probation with a probation period of 3 years. Believers still insist on their innocence. They have the right to appeal against the verdict in cassation procedure, as well as in international instances.

Boris Burylov is already over 80. He is a respected person who has almost half a century of work experience, he has been repeatedly awarded for conscientious work. 52-year-old Igor Turik is raising two children. Alexandr Inozemtsev is 48 years old, he also has a child who is still a minor. For 45-year-old Yuriy Vaag, the criminal case was a continuation of the tragic history of the family: during the Soviet era, his parents were exiled to Siberia on a national basis.

On September 17, 2018, in Perm and other cities of the Perm Territory, searches were carried out in the homes of peaceful believers. FSB officers threatened them with lengthy prison terms. As it turned out, the special services tapped the phones of Turik, Kuchkov and Burylov and conducted covert surveillance behind them.

Igor Turik and Viktor Kuchkov spent 3 days in the temporary detention facility, 101 days under house arrest, and more than 2 years under recognizance agreement. Alexandr Inozemtsev, Yuriy Vaag and Boris Burylov were under recognizance agreement for more than 2.5 years. According to Alexandr Inozemtsev, due to being included in the federal list of Rosfinmonitoring, at first, their family faced serious financial difficulties: “I had to borrow money, since we live in a rented apartment, and the bank account was blocked.”

The believers were helped by the support of relatives, friends and fellow believers from different countries. Igor Turik recalls: “I received a lot of letters and postcards, [friends] gave money and food. There were calls and letters from Poland, Germany, Spain, Austria, USA, Japan... For example, it was very touching to learn that fellow believers in the distant country of Gabon pray for us by name. During this time, we never once needed, although there was no income and we had to pay for a rented apartment."

This is the third verdict that came into force on believers from the Perm Territory. In September 2019, the court upheld the sentence to Alexandr Solovyev, who was fined 300,000 rubles for his faith in Jehovah God. In April 2021, a court in Chelyabinsk approved a fine of 350 thousand rubles to Alexey Metzger.

Despite the fact that there is not a single victim in the criminal case against Turik, Inozemtsev, Burylov, Kuchkov and Vaag, and the faith of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia is not prohibited, believers have had to defend their innocence in courts for almost three years. The prosecution was able to prove only the fact that the men are Jehovah's Witnesses, although they never hid it.