Vitalii Torochkov

A resident of Cherepovets. Torochkov and his wife, Polina Roots, have five children, but they were stripped of their parental rights at the request of Roots' mother, who was granted custody of the four older children. The youngest child, an infant girl, was placed in a foster family. The couple maintained a blog titled "How and Why Children Are Taken Away in Russia." They publicly renounced their Russian citizenship and declared that they would use Soviet-era documents. In September 2022, Torochkov and Roots were detained and taken into custody in a case involving public justification of terrorism. Later it became known that they were also charged with manufacturing and possessing explosives. On June 8, 2023, Torochkov was sentenced to 13 years in a strict-regime penal colony and fined 350,000 rubles.

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