The Kuibyshevsky District Court of Omsk placed under house arrest until June 17 the 57-year-old priest of the Greek Catholic parish of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos, Igor Maksimov, who is being prosecuted in the case of the rehabilitation of Nazism (Part 1 of Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code) and insulting the feelings of believers in places of worship (Part. 2 art. 148 of the Criminal Code). This was reported by the press service of the regional courts.
Maksimov’s detention became known the day before; his house was searched. According to investigators, he “found a stylized icon-like image of the Ukrainian collaborators of Nazism, Bandera, against the background of the Holy Mother of God.” FSB officers saw Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych and Joseph Slipy in the image. The security forces also claim that the man “during worship, spread among parishioners the ideas of the exclusivity of one religion over another, the superiority of the Ukrainian people over the Russian.”
The SHOT Telegram channel wrote that a year earlier Maksimov was called to the police for a “preventative conversation.”
On April 25, the Office of the Ministry of Justice for the Omsk Region filed a lawsuit to liquidate the parish in which Maksimov served. Omsk-inform reports this.
On April 29, Igor Maksimov was not the parish priest, Siberian Express wrote , citing a source familiar with the situation. The man studied at the seminary, but was not ordained.
The Ordinary of the Diocese of Transfiguration in Novosibirsk, Joseph Werth, stated that “not a single clergyman of the Catholic Church was detained, and no similar charges were brought against any clergyman of the Centralized religious organization “Preobrazhenskaya Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church in Novosibirsk” due to the absence of such facts.”
The headline was changed after information appeared that Maksimov was not a priest.
- After the start of the war with Ukraine, the number of cases under the article on the rehabilitation of Nazism (Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code) increased sharply - presumably, security forces use this article to put pressure on those who could potentially oppose the “special operation” in Ukraine and its “denazification.” According to the SOVA Research Center, many cases under Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code are initiated unlawfully and should be classified under other articles of the Criminal Code or resolved within the framework of civil rather than criminal proceedings.