Teenager jailed in Russia for 'terrorist activity' in Minecraft

In Russia, a court sentenced 16-year-old student Nikita Uvarov from Kansk (Krasnoyarsk Territory) to five years in prison on charges of teaching terrorist activities. All this happened because of the action of a teenager in the computer game Minecraft. Writes about it with the BBC.

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The visiting collegium of the Eastern District Military Court sentenced Nikita Uvarov to five years in prison and a fine of 30 rubles ($400), according to Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora human rights group. Two other defendants in the case were released from criminal liability for facilitating the investigation, the prosecutor's office asked them from six to nine years in prison.

Uvarov was taken into custody in the courtroom, Chikov wrote on his Telegram channel.

The teenagers were accused of undergoing training for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities (article 205.3 of the Criminal Code).

The trial was held in closed session.

At the first court hearing, 16-year-old Nikita Uvarov said: “I am a child who wanted to make friends and communicate with friends. I am not a terrorist." He repeated this in his last speech.

“If I am given a real sentence, I will serve it with a clear conscience and dignity. I will be calm, because I never taught my friends anything bad, we were equal and were just friends,” he said at the court hearing.

The case against the teenagers began two years ago when they were 14 years old.

Flyers and Minecraft

In the summer of 2020, three schoolchildren from Kansk were detained for hanging leaflets around the city in support of Azat Miftakhov, a Moscow student and anarchist accused of attempting to set fire to the United Russia office. Schoolchildren pasted one of the leaflets on the building of the local FSB.

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After the arrest, law enforcement officers gained access to the phones and correspondence of schoolchildren and found out that they built the FSB building in the Minecraft computer game and planned to virtually blow it up.

Moreover, the operatives learned that schoolchildren are fond of chemistry, speak negatively about the Russian authorities and read the classics of anarchism. Then two teenagers testified against their friend Nikita Uvarov, who was sent to a pre-trial detention center.

Later, the teenagers withdrew their testimony and stated that they had slandered Uvarov under pressure from the investigation. Uvarov refused to sign a confession. As a result, all three schoolchildren were charged with an article on the creation of a terrorist community and the passage of terrorist training (205.4 and 205.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), and Uvarov was put forward as the organizer of this cell.

According to lawyer Vladimir Vasin, representing the interests of Uvarov, law enforcement agencies could follow the teenagers for a long time before starting a case against them.

According to him, the security forces always monitor the VKontakte social network, publics and correspondence, but the lawyer does not exclude that in this case they also conducted surveillance and wiretapping.

Vasin noted that teenage and school “terrorism” has become very popular among Russian intelligence services and investigative agencies. He called the standard of proof for this category of cases leaving much to be desired - minors are not entitled to a jury under the law.

About a year later, the Investigative Committee dropped the charge of creating a terrorist community from schoolchildren, but left the charge of undergoing training for the purpose of terrorist activity.

The schoolchildren were accused of studying materials for the manufacture of explosives, and some explosives were found during searches in their apartments. Authorities considered several bottles of gasoline in the garage and what schoolchildren made and set off homemade firecrackers in abandoned buildings as making explosives.

Because of this, a group of articles on the storage, manufacture and transportation of explosives was added to the main charge of terrorism.

“We made smoke bombs and homemade firecrackers with different friends. “They liked to carry out experiments, but they didn’t think about terrorism,” Uvarov responded to these accusations during one of the interrogations. “I didn’t offer anything that they charged me with regarding terrorism to my friends, and they didn’t offer me anything. The most we are guilty of is that we played with fire, loved chemistry and experiments, and I also loved reading history.”

The prosecutor's office asked for nine years in prison for Nikita Uvarov, and six and a half years for his other two comrades. Lawyer Vasin explains this precisely by the fact that Uvarov did not sign a confession.

The case of the Kansk schoolchildren contains several examinations, but Uvarov's lawyer says that the main evidence binding the case is precisely these appearances of "two boys who were very frightened and did not want to be taken into custody." In addition to their confessions, the case is based on the words of two key witnesses, whom the media and the protection of adolescents consider provocateurs.

Witness's grandmother and love for Letov

When three schoolchildren were only detained for posting leaflets, two more young adults were detained along with them. However, they became witnesses in this case, and not the accused (one of them, however, was convicted for failing to report the crime).

Little is known about these witnesses for the prosecution, the lawyer calls them "witness P" and "witness L".

At the end of 2020, the Krasnoyarsk “Seventh Channel” released a story about the case of Kansk schoolchildren. In the report, a man in a mask and with a changed voice says that he discussed with Nikita Uvarov "methods of combating the state system."

There is also a "grandmother of the witness" in the plot. The report says that she came to her grandson after being detained by the Investigative Committee and watched how schoolchildren communicate.

“These were conversations of people who absolutely understood what they were doing and were preparing for serious actions on the territory of our city. There were conversations that they were all heroes,” said the “grandmother of the witness.” In this grandmother, the relatives of the accused recognized the former head of Kansk, Anna Kachan, who is now under investigation - a case of negligence has been opened against her.

The identity of the second witness is even more mysterious. But at the end of 2020, the MBKh-Media publication, subsequently blocked in Russia (the prosecutor's office considered it associated with Mikhail Khodorkovsky's organizations, recognized as undesirable in Russia), reported that it was able to communicate with this witness.

According to him, he met Nikita and his friends on the Internet and was in the same chat with him, where they discussed the ideas of anarchism. Some time later, the teenager was detained by FSB officers and asked to write a provocative question in the chat: which of them posted leaflets in support of political prisoners. The students answered that it was them.

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Further, the FSB officers asked him to offer them a meeting, but he could not refuse them, this witness said. It was at this meeting that all the participants in the chat were detained. The witness expressed confidence that the investigation was determined to achieve a real term for the detainees.

The charges were based on linguistic expertise, which analyzes the correspondence of teenagers from their general chat. Experts focus on the fact that Kurt Cobain and his calls for a "fierce revolutionary struggle", the works of Pyotr Kropotkin and the love for the work of Yegor Letov, about whom Nikita Uvarov wrote a lot, were discussed in the chat.

FSB against schoolchildren

The case of Nikita Uvarov and his friends is not the only one of its kind. Before this, in the same Krasnoyarsk Territory, law enforcement officers opened criminal cases against 14-year-old teenagers - it is at this age that criminal liability begins.

So, a case was opened against a schoolboy who allegedly wanted to make an explosion on Hitler's birthday. And another nine schoolchildren were sent to psychiatric institutions for subscribing to publics dedicated to the shooting at the American Columbine school (on February 2, the Supreme Court recognized the Columbine movement as terrorist and banned in Russia).

According to the Open Space project, in Russia since 2017, 35 criminal cases have been opened against teenagers on charges of preparing mass murders, terrorist attacks or extremist actions. All these cases are distinguished by the fact that there are no victims in them - only statements from the investigation that the schoolchildren were planning to do something, the project notes.

Now the court is considering a similar high-profile terrorism case brought against a schoolboy Yaroslav Inozemtsev. When he was arrested, he was 14 years old. The teenager is accused of allegedly preparing bombs and incendiary mixtures in order to kill a school worker and a friend with whom he was in a quarrel. The defense insists that Inozemtsev simply made firecrackers and blew them up in the street for fun.

During the investigation, Inozemtsev was placed in a pre-trial detention center, as well as in a psychiatric dispensary because of his political hobbies.

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