Russian stand-up comedian awaiting trial for joke has detention extended by 6 months

A court in Moscow has agreed to extend the pretrial detention of a Russian stand-up comic while he awaits trial for telling a joke deemed by the authorities to have been insulting to veterans of the Ukraine war, independent news outlet RusNews reported on Monday.

Artemy Ostanin, whose pretrial detention has been extended by another six months, was detained in Belarus while trying to flee Russia in March. Having been severely beaten and humiliated by Belarusian policemen, Ostanin was handed back to the Russian authorities.

A video of Ostanin’s stand-up routine, which has since been deleted from YouTube, included a joke about him bumping into a man on the Moscow metro who had lost both his legs and moved around on a skateboard.

The joke came to the attention of pro-war blogger Alexey Zhivov, who in mid-March 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.

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

By 15 March, as the video was picked up by other pro-war bloggers, the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against Ostanin for “inciting hatred”, a charge punishable by up to six years in prison.

In December, state-affiliated business daily Kommersant reported that an additional charge of “insulting the feelings of believers” had been added to Ostanin’s docket for a separate stand-up performance that took place prior to the one that led to his initial charge.