In the Astrakhan region they asked for 8 years in prison for three Jehovah's Witnesses

In Akhtubinsk, the prosecution asked to assign eight years in a general regime colony to Jehovah's Witnesses Rinat Kiramov, Sergei Korolev and Sergei Kosyanenko. This is reported by a portal covering the persecution of believers in Russia.

The prosecutor also asked that the defendants be subject to two years of restrictions on freedom after serving their sentences and banned from participating in public organizations for four years.

Kiramov, Korolev and Kosyanenko are accused of organizing the activities and financing of an extremist organization (Part 1 of Article 282.2 and Part 1 of Article 282.3 of the Criminal Code). According to investigators, in the period from July 2017 to November 2021, the accused, being the “elders” of the religious organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Akhtubinsky district and the city of Znamensk, Astrakhan region, after the organization was banned, continued to hold meetings, distributed extremist literature, recruited local residents and collected funds under the guise of donations. For the purpose of secrecy, they used video conferencing to communicate and reproduce extremist materials, the investigation believes.

In November 2021, three men were sent to a pre-trial detention center, where they are still being held.

• In 2017, the Supreme Court recognized the “Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia” as an extremist organization, liquidated it and banned its activities in Russia. All organizations of Jehovah's Witnesses were included in the list of prohibited ones, after which a stream of criminal cases against believers began. Rosfinmonitoring has added hundreds of Russian followers of Jehovah's Witnesses to the list of extremists and terrorists. Most of the people on the list are believers between 40 and 60 years old.
• On June 7, 2022, the European Court of Human Rights declared the ban on Jehovah's Witnesses organizations and the subsequent persecution of believers illegal. From the point of view of the ECHR, the decision to liquidate the organization and criminal cases against Jehovah’s Witnesses is based on an overly broad definition of “extremism”, which in Russian legislation “can be applied to absolutely peaceful forms of expression.”