The Russian court was jailed last week by a church pastor for four years after he opposed the Ukrainian invasion in a sermon.
Judge Yevgeny Persin of the Barashika Municipal Court on Wednesday (September 3) sentenced 63-year-old Pastor Nikolai Romaniuk to four years in a 2022 sermon that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “is not our war.”
The court also banned him from administering the website for three years.
According to Forum 18, Roman Niuk will be serving his sentence in a general regime labor camp.
Police officers reportedly arrested Romanyuk after accusing others of blocking military registration and calling on others for a sermon that they gave in September 2022 at the Holy Trinity Pentecostal Church of Barashika, whom they accused of blocking others of military registration and calling for a warning sermon.
Romaniuk’s family reported that an armed officer hit him on the side of his head during his arrest, which leaked fluid from his ears. Officials have not blamed anyone for these suspected behaviours.
“When you are offered a hit, when you are given a bottle of alcohol or a summoned to send into combat, this is the same crime, the same drug, the same Satan,” Romanue said in a 2022 sermon. “If you find me in the Old Testament, find some tips that you can somehow get involved.
“And it doesn’t matter which emperors are seeking this — the Ukrainian emperor, the American emperor, or our emperors are seeking this. This is at least some way of getting vaccinated. This is not our war.”
In his sermon, Romaniuk noted that the written doctrine of the church says that its members are pacifists.
“It is our right to profess this based on the Holy Bible,” he added. “We don’t bless those who go there (to war). We don’t bless those who they force (the people), but we pray that God will save them from it. There are different legal ways to do this.”
Romaniuk said in the court that his sermon was “my personal attitude as a biblical Christian, the holy biblical book of the Old and New Testament – against any violence, any military action, the murder of a person.”
According to Forum 18, he did not seek intervention in governmental activities.
Romaniuk reportedly stated in the court that the Holy Trinity Church “recognizes the importance of military service in the military for the defense of the motherland and that religious beliefs welcome the possibility of alternative civilian service for those who do not allow them to perform mandatory military service.
He argued that “alternative civil service was the same by citizens of the Russian Federation, who had the obligation and duty to protect the motherland as military service, but was carried out in an alternative form different to military service.”
The pastor also noted the church’s “humanitarian assistance” to Russian soldiers and Ukraine’s “inhabitants of new regions and occupied territories.”
“Yes, I gave a sermon touching the army. It’s forced, but it’s murder. I won’t retract what I said,” Roman Niuk said in his final speech to the court on Tuesday (September 2).
Romaniuk also pointed out why parishioners didn’t follow the authorities if he was “very authoritative” as investigators said, if he was “very authoritative” and the investigators were right to undermine the constitutional order.
Rather, he said his parishioners were literally rushing to help those affected by military conflict.
Forum 18 asked the court why the judges imposed such a long sentence despite the pastor’s age and health issues. He suffers from hypertension, cerebrovascular disease, psoriasis and spinal cord problems. The pastor has not fully recovered from the microstrokes he suffered in December, leading to intensive care hospitalization.
He continues to need “life support” medications, suffering from headaches, periods of temporary paralysis and loss of consciousness, Forum 18 reported.
The court did not answer Forum 18 questions at the time of publication. Olga Bystryakovva, Vice Chair of Balashikha City Court, said:
Romaniuk’s conviction means that he “is the first person to be convicted of the court under the Public Clause 280.4 to carry out activities in response to the security of the Russian Federation.
The court also accused him based on the code “using his official position” through these alleged activities “by using mass media or telecommunications networks, including the electronic or the Internet.”
The pastor intends to appeal to the Moscow District Court, but his daughter Svetlana Zhukova wrote in Telegram that “we all fully understand that there will be no fundamental change.” Zhukova also called the case “fully manufactured and motivated by someone’s personal hatred or the general mood.”
“This is my personal opinion. It’s probably not safe to say what you think, but… Imagine it. Dad was convicted of his opinion, his position,” she wrote on Telegram. “He committed no crime. No one suffered from his actions. The nation was in no way suffering at all.”
People who suffer unfairly and illegally from their fathers will likely think they are depriving them of freedom, communication, medical care, participation in communion and the opportunity to serve people, but they cannot deprive them of his true freedom, she writes.
At the time of the sermon, there was “a great mess in many hearts and minds,” recalls Zhukova. “What Dad said was burning in his mind. He couldn’t help but say it, no matter what everyone was thinking, because it’s true. That’s a biblical principle.”
He hoped he would be heard, and people really heard him, she wrote.
“Now we certainly know. We know more than he could have imagined,” Zhukova said. “And perhaps this act of intimidation is intended to curb the opinions of opponents who are trying to express their different opinions.”
Romaniuk is being held at the Pretrial Detention Centre in Noginsk and has been staying for more than 10 months since his arrest in October 2024.
The arrests on October 18 included armed raids at the property of Romaniuk, the home of other church members and the church in Volokolamsk. Authorities forced people to the ground and then detained them for hours at the muzzle. Police confiscated digital devices and bank cards.
Anatoly Perinthev, a lawyer representing the defense witness, later called him “unfairly cruel and unfair” on Telegram, and before the verdict, he said “there are no criminal offences in the actions of the clergy.”
He added, “Frankly, we have little chance of innocence. The Russian judicial system actually doesn’t know what it is. But hope for justice and humanism dies in the end.”
Neither the Moscow Regional Public Prosecutor’s Office nor the office of Barashika City Prosecutor’s Office responded to Forum 18 questions about why long prison sentences and freedom of religious expression are threats to national security.
To make the verdict legal, Forum 18 said the court would cut Romaniuk’s four-year sentence just by the time spent in detention centres in a day-and-a-half prison rate.
Pastor Andrei Midjok, a Russian orthodox (Moscow patriarchal) priest who left Russia in 2022 over his own opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, agreed that Romanue’s prosecutors were both punishment and threats.
“It has made it clear many times that the nation will not allow anti-war preaching,” he wrote on all telegram channels about peace on September 4th.
Opposition from representatives of religious groups is particularly unacceptable to the authorities, he said.
“And this is understandable. Even the weakest voices can stab the hysterical curtains of bloody war propaganda,” Mijok said. “And if this voice sounds like reference to the Holy Bible, it becomes double threatening. So they are taking such utmost care to the manifestations of objections.”
An earlier court hearing on August 18, shared by Pchelintsev on the Telegram Channel, recorded Romanyuk’s attorney Vladimir Ryakhovsky, claiming that the pastor did not seek to interfere with military registration and enlistment office activities.
Liahovsky also said that although church leaders did not mention “a single government agency” in his sermon, experts at the FSB Security Services Institute came to their own conclusions.
