In the City of Zeya, Amur Region, Two Believers Received Six and Six and a Half Years in a Penal Colony for Reading the Bible

Text updated on December 30, 2022.

On December 28, 2022, Judge Olga Kolesova of the Zeya District Court of the Amur Region found Leonid Druzhinin and Yevgeniy Bitusov guilty of conducting religious meetings with friends. Druzhinin was sentenced to six and a half years and Bitusov was sentenced to six years in a general regime penal colony. The verdict has not entered into force and can be appealed.

Druzhinin and Bitusov faced criminal prosecution for their faith back in 2019, when the homes of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Zeya were raided. Searches were repeated a year and a half later. In June 2021, FSB investigator V. Obukhov charged the men with participating in extremist activity, and in October he reclassified the charge to organizing the activity of an extremist organization. The investigation considers Bitusov and Druzhinin guilty because they "deliberately organized weekly religious events"—peaceful meetings for reading and discussing the Bible. Investigator Obukhov has been conducting other similar cases since 2019 against a number of Jehovah's Witnesses from Zeya, Tynda, Blagoveshchensk and Belogorsk.

The charge against Druzhinin and Bitusov was based on the testimony of a woman who attended religious meetings and made hidden video recordings of them. In court, she mixed up  her testimonies and could not remember many things; she was not even sure if she knew the defendants. Witnesses for the prosecution confirmed that there was no incitement to hatred in the words and actions of the believers. There are also no victims of the allegedly extremist activities—prayers, singing songs and talking about the Bible. However, the prosecutor asked the court to impose six and half years of imprisonment on Bitusov and seven years on Druzhinin.

The defendants insisted on their complete innocence. In his final statement, Yevgeniy Bitusov explained: “Charging me with extremism, charging my [spiritual] brothers and sisters throughout the country, and all the evidence cited in the materials, only create the appearance of fighting extremism. Everything is so obviously far-fetched ... There is evidence only that I am a believer who was practicing his religion within the framework of constitutional law.” Leonid Druzhinin noted: “My motive is to obey the commandments to love God and love people, not to change the foundations of the constitutional order.”

The criminal prosecution of Druzhinin and Bitusov, as well as hundreds of other believers in Russia, is based on the speculative thesis that the joint worship of Jehovah's Witnesses constitutes a crime. However, such a position is contrary to the norms of both Russian and international legislation. For example, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that prosecution on such grounds is unlawful: “By seeking to suppress the religious activities of Jehovah’s Witnesses as they did, the Russian authorities failed to act in good faith and breached the State’s duty of neutrality and impartiality vis‑à‑vis the religion of Jehovah’s Witnesses” (§ 254 ).