A Russian court has sentenced this Friday to five and a half years in prison the excommunicated former Russian Orthodox priest Nikolai Romanov for inciting hatred against Catholics and Jews in a new sentence against this denier of the coronavirus who even accused the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, of «treason» in protest, among a multitude of accusations, for the restrictive measures declared by the Government to protect the population from the pandemic.
Romanov, 67, adds this conviction to that handed down against him in November 2021, when he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for violating freedom of conscience and religion, as well as inciting suicide, after taking control of a monastery in Yekaterinburg, expelling the mother superior, and taking advantage of a new pulpit to denounce the Russian government’s vaccination policy, recalls the Russian agency TASS.
Taking into account the time served, the court has decided to combine both prison sentences into a total punishment of seven years behind bars; a term that will start from this Friday.
The former priest, who decided to don the habits in the late 1990s after serving almost all of a 13-year sentence for murder and armed robbery, accused the Kremlin at the time of implanting microchips in the population at vaccination centers, which he described as «Satan’s electronic camps», and urged his followers to «die for Russia».
The «monk» also accused President Putin of being a «traitor to the homeland» and a servant of «a satanic world government», and denounced the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, as a «heretic» who had to be «expelled».
The seizure of the monastery culminated in his excommunication in late May 2020 for violating the priestly oath by failing to comply with the diocese’s order for him to leave the premises. In the same sentence on Friday, his assistant, Vsevolod Moguchev, was sentenced to five years in prison, the Russian agency reports.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
