2023 has already become a record for the number of cases of “financing of extremism”

The incomplete year 2023 has already become a record in Russia for the number of criminal cases on “financing of extremism”, Mediazona found out.

In seven months of this year, 25 cases related to the financing of extremist activity were brought to the Russian courts – more than in the previous years. For the whole of 2022, the courts registered 18 cases, for 2021 – 16.

In 2023, the largest number of cases were brought against those whom the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia considers to be “supporters of the Arrest Criminal Unity (A.U.E.)” – 12 cases. The other cases were initiated against Jehovah’s Witnesses, “citizens of the USSR”, nationalists and donors of FBK.

According to the calculations of “Mediazona”, in two years since FBK was recognized as an extremist organization, criminal cases for its financing were initiated against five people. Two of them – Sergei Shiryaev from Muscovite and Alexey Konovalov from Magadan – were fined 500,000 rubles each.

In total, since the publication of the article on the financing of extremist activity, 157 people have been prosecuted for it. Most of them are followers of the Church of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have been massively persecuted by the Russian authorities since the end of the 2000s. In June 2022, the European Court of Human Rights found the ban and persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia illegal, ordered the release of convicted believers and paid them 63 million euros in compensation.