A Russian court last week jailed a church pastor for four years after he spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine in a sermon.
Judge Yevgeny Parshin at Balashikha City Court on Wednesday (Sept. 3) sentenced the Rev. Nikolay Romanyuk, 63, to four years in prison for saying in a 2022 sermon that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “not our war,” according to rights group Forum 18.
The court also prohibited him from administering websites for three years.
Romanyuk will likely serve his sentence in a general regime labor camp, according to Forum 18.
Prosecutors reportedly arrested Romanyuk after they accused him of calling on others to block military registration and enlistment offices in a livestreamed sermon he gave at Holy Trinity Pentecostal Church, Balashikha, in September 2022. He gave the sermon on the first Sunday after the government announced “partial mobilization” for the invasion of Ukraine.
Romanyuk’s family reported that armed officers hit him on the side of the head during the arrest, which caused fluid to leak from his ear. Officials have not reprimanded anyone for these alleged actions.
“When you are offered a hit, when you are offered a bottle of alcohol or you are given a summons to send you to combat – this is the same sin, and the same drug, and the same Satan,” Romanyuk reportedly said in his 2022 sermon. “Find me in the Old Testament even a hint that we could somehow participate.
“And it does not matter which tsar calls for this – the Ukrainian tsar, the American tsar, or our tsar calls for this. I would like this to be a vaccination, at least in some way. This is not our war.”
In the sermon, Romanyuk pointed out that the church’s written doctrine says members are pacifists.
“It is our right to profess this on the basis of Holy Scripture,” he added. “We do not bless those who go there [to war]. We do not bless [those] whom they take by force, but we pray that God rescues them from there. There are different legal ways to do this.”
Romanyuk stated in court that his sermon had been about “my personal attitude as a Christian – based on the Bible, the books of Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments – to any violence, to any military action, to a person’s murder.”
He did not call for interference in government bodies’ activities, according to Forum 18.
Romanyuk reportedly stated in court that Holy Trinity Church recognized “the importance of military service in the Armed Forces for the defense of the Fatherland and welcomes the possibility of alternative civilian service for those whose religious beliefs do not allow them to perform compulsory military service.”
He argued that “alternative civilian service is the same fulfillment by a citizen of the Russian Federation of his duty and obligation to defend the Fatherland as military service, but performed in a different, alternative form to military service.”
The pastor also noted the church’s “humanitarian aid” to Russian soldiers and to “residents of new regions and occupied territories” in Ukraine.
“Yes, I gave a sermon in which I touched on military, albeit forced, murder. I do not retract what I said,” Romanyuk said in his final speech to the court on Tuesday (Sept. 2.) “I set forth my personal view and attitude towards the taking of a human life. This is my personal attitude as a clergyman. I do not retract my sermon.”
Romanyuk also pointed out that if he was “very authoritative,” as investigators said, and if the investigators were correct that he undermined the constitutional order, why had no parishioners disobeyed authorities?
His parishioners, rather, literally rushed to help those affected by the military conflict, he said.
Forum 18 asked the court why the judge imposed such a long jail sentence despite the pastor’s age and health issues. He suffers from hypertension, cerebrovascular disease, psoriasis, and spinal problems. The pastor has still not fully recovered from a micro-stroke he suffered in December that led to his hospitalization in an intensive care unit.
He continues to need “life-sustaining” medication and suffers headaches, periods of temporary paralysis, and loss of consciousness, Forum 18 reported.
The court had not responded to Forum 18’s questions at the time of publication. Assistant chair of Balashikha City Court Olga Bystryakova said only that: “A judge is not obliged to give any explanations on the merits of cases considered or in progress, or to present them to anyone for review, except in cases and in the manner provided for by procedural law.”
Romanyuk’s conviction means he is the first person a court has convicted under Criminal Code Article 280.4 of “public calls to implement activities directed against the security of the Russian Federation, or to obstruct the exercise by government bodies and their officials of their powers to ensure the security of the Russian Federation” for criticizing Russia’s war against Ukraine from a religious perspective, according to Forum 18.
The court also charged him under the code with “using his official position” via these alleged activities “with the use of mass media, or electronic, or information and telecommunication networks, including the internet.”
The pastor intends to appeal to Moscow Regional Court, though his daughter Svetlana Zhukova wrote on Telegram that “we all understand perfectly well that there will be no fundamental changes.” Zhukova also called the case “completely fabricated, motivated either by someone’s personal hatred or by a general mood.”
“This is my personal opinion – although it’s probably not safe to say what you think…Imagine, Dad was convicted for his opinion, his position,” she wrote on Telegram. “He committed no crime. Not a single person suffered from his actions. The state did not suffer at all.”
Those who are unfairly and illegally tormenting her father probably think they are depriving him – of freedom, communication, medical care, participation in communion, the opportunity to continue serving people – but they cannot take away his true freedom, she wrote.
At the time of the sermon there was “great confusion in many hearts and heads,” Zhukova recalled. “What Dad said was burning in his mouth, in his heart. He could not help but say it, no matter what anyone thought. Because it is the truth. It is a biblical principle.”
He hoped that he would be heard, and people have indeed heard him, she wrote.
“Now we know for sure. Much further and more than he could have imagined,” Zhukova stated. “And, probably, this act of intimidation aims to suppress the opinion of dissenters, who dare to express their different opinion.”
Romanyuk is being held in a pre-trial detention center in Noginsk, where he has been for more than 10 months since his arrest in October 2024.
The Oct. 18 arrest involved armed raids at Romanyuk’s home, other church members’ homes and the church property in Volokolamsk. Authorities forced people to the ground and held then at gunpoint for hours. Police confiscated digital devices and bank cards.
Attorney Anatoly Pchelintsev, representing a defense witness, on Telegram later called the sentence “unjustifiably cruel and unfair” and stated before the verdict, “there is no criminal offense in the clergyman’s actions.”
He added that, “frankly speaking, we have almost no chance of acquittal. The Russian justice system practically does not know what that is. However, hope for justice and humanism dies last.”
Neither the Moscow Region Prosecutor’s Office nor the Balashikha City Prosecutor’s Office responded to Forum 18’s questions about the long jail sentence and why freedom of religious expression is a threat to state security.
For the verdict to become legal, Forum 18 stated, the court would reduce Romanyuk’s four-year sentence by the amount of time he has spent in custody at a ratio of one day in the detention center to a day and a half in prison.
The Rev. Andrey Mizyuk, a Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate) priest who left Russia in 2022 over his own opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, agreed that Romanyuk’s prosecution is both punishment and intimidation.
“The state has made it clear more than once that it does not forgive anti-war preaching,” he wrote on the Peace Unto All Telegram channel on Sept. 4. “Pastor Nikolay was among those who could not remain silent [about the war] and clearly, to his misfortune, said with extreme honesty what he considered to be the duty of a Christian…The Russian state did not forgive him for this.”
Objections from representatives of religious organizations are especially unacceptable to authorities, he stated.
“And this is understandable: Any attempt to tell the truth, even the weakest voice, is capable of piercing the hysterical curtain of propaganda of a bloody war,” Mizyuk stated. “And if this voice sounds with a reference to Holy Scripture, it becomes doubly threatening. That is why they pay such close attention to any manifestation of dissent.”
A previous court hearing on Aug. 18, which Pchelintsev shared on his Telegram channel, recorded Romanyuk’s lawyer Vladimir Ryakhovsky insisting that the pastor had not called for any obstruction of the activity of military registration and enlistment offices.
Ryakhovsky also noted that the church leader had not mentioned “a single government body” in his sermon, but that experts from the FSB security service Institute of Forensic Science made their own conclusions, which the “inconsistent and extremely contradictory” testimony of one witness supported.
