MOSCOW (AP) — A former Russian Orthodox monk who denied the existence of the coronavirus and defied the Kremlin was sentenced to seven years in prison Friday.
Nikolai Romanov, 67, known as Father Sergiy until his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church, urged his followers to disobey government quarantine rules and spread conspiracy theories about a global plan to control the masses.
A court in Moscow found him guilty of incitement to hatred. His lawyer immediately said that he will appeal.
Romanov was a policeman during Soviet times and after he resigned he was sentenced to 13 years in prison for murder, robbery and assault. He became a monk after his release.
As the coronavirus pandemic began, he denied its existence and denounced government measures to stop transmission as “Satan’s electronic field.” He spread widely disproven conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and said that vaccines created against the virus were part of a global plan to control the masses through microchips.
The monk lashed out at President Vladimir Putin as a “traitor to the Fatherland” serving a satanic “world government” and denounced the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Cyril and other hierarchs as “heretics” who should be “expelled”.
Romanov took refuge in a monastery near Yekaterinburg founded by him, where dozens of rude military veterans forced everyone to submit to their rules after the departure of the abbess and nuns.
The Russian Orthodox Church stripped Romanov of his rank as abbot for violating monastic rules and later excommunicated him, but he rejected those rulings. Facing stubborn resistance from hundreds of his followers, church officials and local authorities wavered for months before finally expelling and arresting Romanov.
Romanov had been in prison since December 2020. In November 2021 he was sentenced to three and a half years for inciting suicide in sermons in which he urged the faithful to “die for Russia” and abusing freedom of conscience, accusations he rejected. The new sentence will be simultaneous with the previous one.
