Prosecutors request six-year prison sentence for Russian stand-up comedian’s joke

Prosecutors have requested a Moscow court sentence Russian stand-up comedian Artemy Ostanin to 5 years and 11 months in a penal colony for a joke he made during a stand-up routine he posted on YouTube last year, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Tuesday.

Ostanin’s legal problems began in March when a joke he told about bumping into a man who had lost both his legs and moved around on a skateboard on the Moscow metro came to the attention of pro-war blogger Alexey Zhivov.

In mid-March, Zhivov informed his Telegram channel’s 100,000 subscribers that a stand-up comedian in Moscow was “joking gleefully” about disabled veterans of the war in Ukraine, an accusation Ostanin has always denied.

Ultranationalist movement Zov Naroda, which is best known for denouncing public figures it sees as ideologically “unsound” to the Russian authorities, then contacted Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, to demand a “legal appraisal” of the incident.

The comedian attempted to flee the country through Belarus but was detained in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, by law enforcement in whose custody he was subjected to brutal beatings in events Ostanin recounted in court on Tuesday. He described being tasered and beaten with batons, and the guards cutting his hair and threatening to slit his throat, details which the presiding judge determined were irrelevant to the case.

In December, after being detained in Moscow for several months following his return from Minsk, a further charge was added to Ostanin’s docket for “insulting the feelings of believers” over a joke in one of his shows about a conversation with Jesus, in a clip that was posted online by who the Prosecutor’s Office referred to as his “accomplices”.