Judge Sergei Savrin handed down half the 12-year general-regime sentence prosecutors had sought, finding Gulyayev guilty on three counts under Part 2, Article 207.3(d) of the Criminal Code — disseminating "fakes" about the army motivated by hatred — Mediazona reported.
The charges stemmed from three reposts on his VKontakte page, made on March 13, March 31 and September 24, 2022. All three were news items from the Ukrainian agency UNIAN: one about the shooting of a column of women and children during an evacuation from the village of Peremoha, one about the killing of Anastasia Tagirova, a student at Drahomanov National Pedagogical University, and one about violence against children from a lawyers' report at a UN session.
In court, Gulyayev said he harbors no hatred toward Russian servicemen. He is the son of an officer and Chechen War veteran, and his grandmother and godfather live in Zaporizhzhia, with whom he was in contact both before and after the war began. According to him, he made the reposts to cope with stress and out of compassion for his relatives.
The defendant's sister told the outlet MR7 that after 2022 he complained he could not think about anything other than his relatives' accounts. His wife described him as kind and non-confrontational, noting that he worried about the war but did not express opinions about it.
Psychologist Anastasia Pozdnyakova and literature specialist Olga Raskina, in the prosecution's expert examination, pointed to signs of inciting hostility toward Russian servicemen in the reposts. A defense expert, Alexei Zabarin, a candidate of psychological sciences, insisted the examination had not accounted for the context and the defendant's state — in his view, hatred is present in the materials, but it was the author of the posts, not Gulyayev, who called for it.
Gulyayev's page was blocked at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office on April 5, 2022, which he learned about only during the investigation. The defense asked for the case to be reclassified under Part 1 of Article 207.3 — without the hatred motive — and terminated due to the expiration of the statute of limitations, or for a fine to be imposed.
In his final statement, Gulyayev said he had not been aware of the public danger of his actions, considering his VKontakte page a personal space. He asked that his life not be ruined and that the motive of political hatred be removed from the charges.
His detention became known in November 2025, and he remained in custody throughout the investigation and trial. Before his arrest he worked as a dispatcher at a company servicing car alarms, and while in the pretrial detention center he married his girlfriend.