Alexander Pichugin

Alexander Pichugin is a journalist from Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region, an editor of Reporter-NN and the author of the Telegram channel Sorokin Khvost. He became one of the first Russian journalists prosecuted under Article 207.1 of the Criminal Code, introduced in 2020 to punish the public dissemination of allegedly false information concerning threats to public health and safety.

The case arose from a post Pichugin published on April 12, 2020, Palm Sunday. Written in a deliberately sarcastic style, the post referred to a supposedly “planned operation” to infect people with a deadly disease. Pichugin later explained that he was criticizing mass attendance at Orthodox church services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He deleted the post the following day after learning that security services were interested in it. On April 16, FSB officers and armed personnel searched his home, seized his electronic devices and took him for questioning. A criminal case under Article 207.1 was opened on April 17.

A central issue at trial was whether the post constituted a factual assertion or satire. A defence linguist concluded that it was sarcastic and could not reasonably be understood as news reporting. An investigator’s expert disagreed. A third examination, commissioned by the court and conducted by specialists from the Justice Ministry’s Volga Regional Centre of Forensic Expertise, concluded that the text was an extended metaphor rather than a statement of fact.

Despite that finding, prosecutors requested two and a half years of restricted freedom. On November 11, 2020, the Bogorodsk City Court convicted Pichugin and imposed a fine of 300,000 rubles. His case became one of the most prominent early prosecutions of a journalist under Russia’s pandemic-era “false information” law.

Since 2022, Pichugin has lived outside Russia.