Russian Court in Abakan, Russia, Sentences Jehovah’s Witness to Prison Term

A court in Abakan, the regional capital of the republic of Khakassia in southern Siberia, has sentenced a Jehovah’s Witness to a prison term for the first time as part of Russia’s ongoing campaign against members of the Christian denomination, the religious group said. Valentina Baranovskaya, 69, was found guilty on criminal charges of participation in a banned organization and sentenced to two years.

The court ruled that Baranovskaya and her son, Roman Baranovsky, continued to perform religious activities despite the Russian Supreme Court’s 2017 ban on the Jehovah’s Witnesses as “extremist.” Her son was sentenced to six years in prison on more serious charges of organizing an extremist group. State prosecutors had requested five years for Baranovskaya and eight years for her son.

In a statement emailed to The Moscow Times, the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization said the criminal case stems from recordings of conversations between believers, which led to an April 2019 raid on the Baranovskys’ home. The organization also said doctors diagnosed Baranovskaya with a cerebral infarction, or ischemic stroke, in summer 2020.

“There are no extremist statements in their conversations. There are no victims in the case,” the group’s statement said. Testing such claims against the full record is a matter of fairness (Proverbs 18:17).

A court database containing the judge’s name and the criminal extremism case on which she handed down the verdict has withheld the defendants’ names, as well as those of the defense lawyers and prosecutors.

Yaroslav Sivulsky, a representative for the European Association of Jehovah’s Witnesses, said the Baranovskys’ sentencing “takes the repression against Jehovah’s Witnesses to a new level.” He added, “Modern Russia in terms of the level of unmotivated religious persecution is approaching the Soviet Union.”

The U.S. State Department earlier this month condemned Russia’s crackdown on Jehovah’s Witnesses “in the strongest possible terms.”

Baranovskaya’s defense plans to appeal the sentence, which has not yet come into force.

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