Sergei Kovtoniuk
- Criminal Code
- Article 205.2 part 2, Russian Criminal Code
- Case category
- Anti-war casesTerrorism cases
- Verdict
- Ban on activity, Imprisonment (general regime)
- Sentence
- 3 years
- Date of verdict
- 2024-08-07
- Region
- Murmansk Oblast
- City
- Murmansk
- Facility
- ФКУ «ИК № 5 УФСИН России по Кировской области»
- Address for letters
- 613040, Кировская область, г. Кирово-Чепецк, ул. Овражная, 16, ФКУ «ИК № 5 УФСИН России по Кировской области», Ковтонюк Сергей Николаевич, 1989 г.р.
Recognition by human rights organisations
- Recognised as a political prisonerby Memorial: Support for Political Prisoners, 4 June 2025
This is the assessment of the organisation named above, not ours. FACTUM reports it with attribution and does not make its own.
Case summary
A resident of Murmansk. In March 2024, he was taken into custody on charges of publicly justifying terrorism over a song he had posted on his VKontakte page in October 2022. According to him, at that time, as a result of conversations with relatives living in Ukraine, “he had formed a false view of what was happening, of reality”, but since then his opinion had changed. On 7 August 2024, Kovtonyuk was sentenced to three years in a general-regime penal colony.
Others charged under Article 205.2 part 2, Russian Criminal Code
What we write about political persecution
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Source: this person’s record in the OVD-Info political persecution database
Published under CC BY 3.0. The criteria for treating a person as politically persecuted belong to OVD-Info; FACTUM relays their assessment and makes none of its own.
OVD-Info has been designated an «extremist» organisation in Russia — by decision of the Russian authorities, like other independent human rights and media projects.