A minute of black humor about the war in Ukraine and another joke with Jesus Christ as the protagonist have cost Russian monologist Artiom Ostanin five years and nine months in prison. The Meshchansky court in Moscow has imposed the sentence on him, considering him the author of two crimes: inciting hatred and offending religious feelings. The comedian – who has been in preventive detention since March last year, when he was tried – denounced mistreatment by the police and irregularities in the trial, but his complaints were ignored.
Ostanin participated last year in a program on the YouTube channel Stand up in 60 seconds. During his speech, broadcast on March 7, he said that he had been run over by a “legless skater who stepped on a mine.” A movement loyal to the Kremlin, Call of the peoplemade his performance go viral after accusing the comedian of “mocking a disabled man who possibly lost his legs in the special military operation,” the official name in Russia. And he ended up filing a legal complaint. A court opened the case just a week later: on March 15. And that same month the trial was held. The sentence has come almost a year later.
“I did not mention a single word about the special military operation in the joke, it is an invention of those channels [denunciantes]”, the comedian lamented publicly at that first moment, when his performance began to spread among the Russian media.
The comedian has reported that security forces beat him and shaved his hair during his arrest in Minsk, where he had fled, and his return to Moscow. Even a member of the Russian president’s Human Rights Council, Eva Merkachiova, shared on her Telegram channel a photo of the comedian’s back with obvious wounds from a beating. According to his lawyer, he also received electric shocks.
“In difficult times, a discourse arises that seems to justify illegal actions against the accused. Even if a person has committed a crime (proven by a court), that fact does not give the right to commit a crime against him. Otherwise, what is the difference with them?” Merkachiova then remarked.
Once in the Russian capital, the Russian Investigative Committee published a video in which Ostanin asked for “his sincere apologies”, a statement that has not freed him from jail.
Almost a year later, Ostanin’s trial “has been tense,” according to the report in the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. The newspaper said that Judge Olesia Mendeleeva “made it clear from the first minute that she had no intention of listening to the accused.”
The court did accept an expert report that stated that the comedian’s performance “presents an image of a person with a ridiculous disability, which evokes disgust, in contrast to the image of Ostanin.”
The trial against the comedian incorporated a new crime last December. The investigation found another performance from 2024 where Ostanin evoked an imaginary dialogue with Jesus Christ. “I turned to Jesus and he answered me: ‘sit down and let’s have a drink’. I told the people and do you know what they did to me? They crucified me,” he said.
Ostanin was then accused by the Russian authorities of being part of “a criminal group”, responsible for the video, and of making it “with a cynical attitude” towards Jesus Christ. According to the Investigative Committee, a case has been opened to prosecute other possible participants in the channel.
In his last intervention before the court, the comedian apologized if anyone had felt offended and demanded his acquittal, even if this was a sentence limited to the time he had already spent in preventive detention.
