The court found a schoolboy’s audio message about Ukraine, which “has been sucking its entire existence from Russia,” as extremist

The Ministry of Justice included in the register of extremist materials a video about a schoolboy who, during a dispute, recorded an audio message about Ukraine, which “has always been part of Russia” and “has sucked its entire existence from Russia.”

The decision to recognize the video “Political scientist <...> on state conflicts” as extremist was made by the Surgut City Court this summer. The prosecutor's office ordered a linguistic examination of the video, which found there "a negative image of the Ukrainian nation and the state of Ukraine."

The teenager recorded the audio in November 2020, after which “he had to delete his pages on social networks,” notes the Beware the News project. The student’s audio message was used in memes, including overlaying it on recordings of President Vladimir Putin’s speeches.

In 2021, a resident of Surgut was fined for publishing this video on VKontakte under the extremist article on “inciting hatred” (Article 20.3.1 of the Administrative Code). Before this, he was also fined for pictures with swastikas (Article 20.3 of the Administrative Code). In both cases, the posts were brought to the attention of criminal investigation officers.

For distributing files from the register of extremist materials, citizens face up to 15 days of arrest or a fine of up to three thousand rubles (Article 20.29 of the Administrative Code). They will also not be able to participate in elections for a year.

In addition to the audio recording of the schoolchild, the registry today added a video about a girl with a knife who says “I will kill the Russians!”, an issue of the samizdat newspaper “RaSvet” from Perm with a xenophobic article “The secret of blood is worse than AIDS,” which was distributed among local military personnel, and two songs from far-right musicians.