Judge Zhasulan Khusainov of Court No. 2 of the Medeu district of Almaty delivered the verdict, the hieromonk's sister Svetlana told Novaya Gazeta Europe. Vorontsov was nominally given six years, but the term was cut by a third under an amnesty Kazakhstan's authorities declared in connection with the adoption of a new constitution. Along with the colony term, the court imposed a fine of 86,500 tenge (about $200) and recovery of court costs of 39,500 tenge (about $88).
The criminal case was opened in the autumn of 2025 on the basis of testimony from two secret witnesses. The priest was initially charged with organizing a brothel and sent to a pretrial detention center, but before the trial began that charge was dropped, leaving an article on possession of prohibited substances. The court excluded the testimony of one of the secret witnesses from the case file - the prosecution could not prove that this person existed at all. The second witness, according to the defense, may have been a law enforcement officer, but this cannot be established: his name was hidden from participants in the proceedings.
The hearings were held behind closed doors. The hieromonk's lawyer, Galym Nurpeisov, told journalists that the investigation did not examine how and when the prohibited substance appeared in the priest's home on the outskirts of Almaty. The defense asserts there is no evidence to establish guilt. A colleague of Father Ioakov earlier told Novaya Gazeta Europe that, by all indications, the substance was planted on February 11, and the hieromonk was arrested the next day.
In May, Vorontsov was placed in a specialized psychiatric hospital, where doctors found no drug dependence. For several years, his mother, sister and nephew lived in the same house as the priest, and they denied any suspicions of that kind. The hieromonk did not admit guilt at any stage of the proceedings, and in mid-September, after the court was declared closed, he began a protest hunger strike. The defense intends to appeal the verdict.
The proceedings are being monitored by the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law. The bureau's head, Yevgeny Zhovtis, considers the prosecution of Father Ioakov politically motivated.
Until February 2022, Vorontsov was a cleric of the Russian Orthodox Church's Kazakhstan Metropolitan District, introduced the Kazakh language into services and condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In 2023 he published an appeal to Orthodox Kazakhstanis to distance themselves from Patriarch Kirill and proposed establishing a metochion of the Constantinople Patriarchate in Kazakhstan. After that, the Astana diocese banned him from serving and then defrocked him - a decision approved by Kirill. The priest sought registration of a community he founded outside the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. On a denunciation by a female parishioner of Almaty's cathedral, a first case was opened against him - on inciting religious hatred - but it was closed for lack of corpus delicti a few days before the drug case was opened. Both cases were handled by the same investigator of the Almaty police department, Samat Atakhan.