Andrei Voronin

He was born in Togliatti and is a blogger. He has lived in Moscow and the Nizhny Novgorod region and has been repeatedly prosecuted. Based on scattered data and texts, the project “Support for Political Prisoners. Memorial” claims that on 27 March 2020, he lit three bonfires nearby his home (apparently in the Nizhny Novgorod region), and when the head of the village council and an officer of the Ministry of Emergency Situations arrived, he swung a poker at the first and berated the second. This incident led to the initiation of a case of threatening to use violence and insulting representatives of the authorities. After that Voronin was also charged with threatening to commit a terrorist act because of a certain online post. It is not known which one, but Voronin occasionally made online posts with rather radical statements. On 4 April 2020, his home was searched, and a packet of gunpowder was found during the search. Voronin claimed that it had been planted on him. On 15 April 2021, he was sentenced in a case involving all these charges to 12 years in a strict regime colony. It is possible that the case also included an article on violation of the rules of road traffic and operation of vehicles, but the details of the relevant charge are unknown. Voronin’s case file in the court of cassation does not contain this article, which allowed the project “Support for Political Prisoners. Memorial” to conclude that the article appeared in the case file of the court of first instance as a result of a mistake. It is also possible that this charge was excluded from the case at some stage. On 28 April 2022, the court of cassation reduced the prison sentence by two months.

When Voronin was already in the colony, a case was initiated against him for disorganising the work of the institution: according to the investigation, he went on hunger strike, after which he used violence against the deputy head of the security department. On 30 July 2024, Voronin was sentenced to two and a half years of imprisonment and, taking into account the remaining time from his previous sentence, to nine years in a strict regime colony.

The third case against him was initiated under articles on the dissemination of “fakes” about the Russian army and justification of terrorism for conversations he had with his cellmates about the war in Ukraine. According to the cellmates’ denunciations, Voronin said that to stop the war in Ukraine, “Putin needs to be shot dead” and called him a Nazi. In July 2025, the court began hearing the case. At one of the sessions, one of the prisoners who testified against Voronin, Dmitri Ivanov, said that the staff of the colony administration wanted to “trigger” Voronin for a new term and falsified the charges, and he, Ivanov, agreed to incriminate Voronin and signed the necessary testimony without looking at it. On 17 July, the court sentenced Voronin to six years of imprisonment; taking into account the previously imposed sentence, he was sentenced to ten years, of which three years were to be spent in a prison and the rest of the term in a strict regime colony.

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