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Former Moscow municipal deputy Alexei Gorinov, who was convicted over anti-war statements, has applied to be transferred to a medical correctional facility, reports Mediazona. The outlet learned this during a hearing on Gorinov’s defence appeal. His lawyers were trying to challenge the prosecutor’s refusal to reopen his case in light of new circumstances. The politician participated via video link from Correctional Colony No. 10 in Altai, a region in southern Siberia. At the hearing, 62-year-old Gorinov said he had been held for a month and a half in a poorly heated cell-type room, where ice formed on the inside of the window frame. He said he wore a jumper all the time. “They force me to take it off, under threat of physical force, you understand? … I just sit by the radiator the whole day,” said Gorinov. He is currently suffering from bronchitis and has already been admitted to the prison hospital three times. Gorinov also has a chronic lung condition. In 2016, part of his lung was removed following a previous case of tuberculosis.
  • In July 2022, the former municipal deputy was sentenced to seven years in a general regime colony on charges of spreading “fake news” about the military (paragraphs “a,” “b,” “d” of part 2, article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). Gorinov was prosecuted over statements he made at a meeting of the Krasnoselsky district council in Moscow. He called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a war rather than a “special operation,” spoke about children killed by the Russian military, and said the Russian authorities intended to seize the whole territory of Ukraine.
  • In November 2024, he was sentenced to three years in a colony on a new charge of “justifying terrorism” (part 1, article 205.2 of the Criminal Code). This case was opened over conversations Gorinov had with other prisoners in the colony hospital. According to investigators, he said of the explosion on the Crimean Bridge: “Well, they blew it up. There’s a war on. Because Crimea is their territory”; and, speaking of the Azov Regiment, said: “What kind of filth is that? They’re the Armed Forces.”
The story has been corrected to clarify that Gorinov is being held in a poorly heated, not entirely unheated, room