Nikita Zhuravel. Photo: Kadyrov_95 / Telegram
A Russian man who was jailed for 3.5 years in February for burning a Quran outside a mosque in the southern Russian city of Volgograd has had fresh charges pressed against him for treason, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office announced on Thursday.
According to the Prosecutor General’s Office, Nikita Zhuravel, 20, contacted a member of the Security Service of Ukraine through an online messenger and “offered his cooperation” before proceeding to send videos of military aircraft, trains transporting military equipment, and movements of military vehicles to the individual in March 2023.
Under Russian law, the maximum punishment for treason is life imprisonment.
Zhuravel was originally arrested in May 2023 after he posted a video of himself setting fire to a Quran outside a mosque in the southern Russian city of Volgograd. At the time, investigators claimed he had confessed to doing so “on the orders of the Ukrainian intelligence services” for a reward of 10,000 rubles (€100).
Shortly after his arrest, Zhuravel was transferred to a pretrial detention centre in the Muslim-majority republic of Chechnya, where he was subsequently beaten by Adam Kadyrov, the 15-year-old son of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-appointed head of Chechnya.
Posting a video of the incident, Ramzan Kadyrov said that he was “proud” of his son for attacking the detainee. As Adam Kadyrov was a minor, police declined to open a criminal case against him over the attack, and he was later named Hero of Chechnya and received multiple awards from other Muslim-majority regions in Russia.
Zhuravel is considered a political prisoner by Russian human rights group Memorial and a religious prisoner of conscience by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
