A rebel Russian monk who condemned the Kremlin and denied the existence of the coronavirus was convicted on charges of encouraging suicide and sentenced to 3.5 years in prison.
The monk Father Sergiy is Arrested for inciting suicide in December 2020 Through the sermon, he urged believers to “die for Russia”, violate freedom of conscience and take arbitrary actions. He dismissed the allegations, and his lawyers stated that they would appeal the decision of the Moscow Izmailovo District Court on Tuesday.
Sergiy responded to the judgment with the phrase “Don’t judge, you will not be judged” in the Bible.
When the coronavirus pandemic began, the 66-year-old monk denied its existence and condemned the government’s efforts to contain the pandemic as “Satan’s electronic camp.” He spread the long-debunked conspiracy theory about Covid-19 and described the coronavirus vaccine being developed against the virus as part of a global conspiracy to control the masses through microchips.
The monk urged believers to disobey the government’s blockade measures, Hiding in a monastery near Yekaterinburg He founded and owned dozens of burly volunteers, including veterans of the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine, to help enforce his rules when the convent and several nuns left.
The monks denounced President Putin as a “traitor of the motherland” serving Satan’s “world government”, and denounced the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill and other top clergy as “heretics” and must be “pushed out.”
The Russian Orthodox Church deprived him of his position as abbot for violating monastery rules and later expelled him from the church, but he rejected the ruling and ignored the subpoena from the police investigator. Faced with strong resistance from hundreds of supporters, church officials and local authorities seemed reluctant to expel him for months.
Sergi’s real name is Nikolai Romanov, and he served as a police officer during the Soviet period. After leaving the law enforcement team, he was convicted of murder, robbery and assault, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. After being released from prison, he joined the mission school and later became a monk.
