Mentally ill student accused of calling for terrorism

We are talking about Article 205.2, Part 2, of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Public calls for terrorist activities using the Internet.” Instead of treatment, the guy has been kept in a pre-trial detention center for more than six months.

This case caused outrage among professional psychiatrists. They oppose the fact that investigators use their patients as statistics on the fight against terrorism and extremism.

On February 2, 2023, 19-year-old college student Vlad (we are not giving his last name at the request of the family) was detained in Odintsovo near Moscow. This is how it happened, according to the testimony of relatives.

It was early morning, about six o’clock. The doorbell of the apartment rang. Mom woke up first and woke up dad. He immediately opened the door to law enforcement officers and was instantly laid on the floor. They put a machine gun to my head. In total, 12 armed people came to capture the student “terrorist” that morning.

“Vlad himself woke up from the noise, shouted: “Mom, mom,” and ran to her,” says older sister Christina. – They hit him on the legs. He fell. Mom ran up to him with the words: “I’m close, son.” She took his hands to calm him down (shortly before this, her brother was treated in a psychiatric hospital). And people in masks began to beat her with the butts of machine guns… All my mother’s hands were blue. The hematomas did not go away for a long time.

“They went in hard” – that’s what they say about such seizures. This could have been justified if law enforcement officers had broken into an apartment where a cell of the terrorist organization ISIS, banned in the Russian Federation, was meeting. In this same apartment live not just respectable citizens, but people who have linked their fate with serving the state.

Her father is a former border guard officer, her mother is an employee of the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation (before that she worked as a civil judge in one of the Moscow region courts). By the way, the next day after a criminal case was opened against her son, the woman was asked “just in case” to resign of her own free will, without even trying to understand what had happened.

Those who sanctioned Vlad’s “severe” detention could not but know that he had a mental disorder. Moreover, the security forces have already come to visit him…

Relatives show photos of a cute, smiling child. They say that he was always trusting and went into everyone’s arms.

“All my friends played with it when they came to me,” says Christina. — Very open and loving attention. Sometimes he stutters: this happens at moments when emotions overwhelm him.

Christina shows the messages she received from her brother. These are mostly touching messages, accompanied by photographs of animals, flowers, beautiful sunrises and sunsets. Shortly before the tragedy (and for the whole family, what happened was a tragedy), he sent his sister a photo: a butterfly that landed right on his palm.

“He’s a romantic,” says Christina. — Since childhood, I dreamed of traveling and also being a “hurricane explorer.” His whole room is filled with books about travel and animals. We gave them to him for his birthdays at his request. By the way, he never blew out the candles on the cake alone – we always did it together.

Vlad desperately needed friendship. But due to the pandemic, I had very little contact with my peers. After 9th grade (graduated with “good” and “excellent”) in 2020, Vlad entered a prestigious law college. And at first everything was fine. But then we realized that they were mocking him there. They made fun of his clothes, gentleness (love of cats and dogs).

He could ask: “Is it normal that the guys leave me to look after their phones, which are charging, while they go for a walk?” He began to suspect that he was being used. They were friends in the group according to certain rules; there was a leader to whom everyone had to obey.

Then there was a conflict with a girl: Vlad publicly reprimanded her for smoking a vape right in class. There was probably a lot more, I found out in fits and starts. For example, once he was running away from five classmates (hiding in the bushes), and somehow he was beaten…

Some classmates have their own version of what happened. Some people think that Vlad inappropriately mentioned his mother (they say he was arrogant, his relatives insist he was proud). Be that as it may, no one denies the fact of the conflict. For some reason, there was no psychologist or teacher who could help solve it at the educational institution.

Vlad’s father often drove Vlad to college by car, and he said that when approaching the educational institution, his son began to have severe stomach pain (as a reaction to stress). As a result, his family convinced him to transfer to another educational institution.

But this, as it turned out, did not solve the problems. Vlad continued to communicate with former classmates, and this communication was not constructive. All this coincided with family grief – my grandmother died of coronavirus. Vlad closed himself off and almost stopped going out. He even went to the pool with his dad at night – because at that time of day there are no people (and “people hurt”).

“We turned to a psychologist, who stated a loss of critical thinking and an eating disorder,” says dad. — It was in the summer of 2022. At the end of September 2022, he again said that he and our entire family were being slandered and he did not understand what to do. He was in a very excited, panicky state. We tried to support him, asked him not to read messages, not to take anything to heart.

One fateful day in early October 2022, Vlad wrote a message on the social media page of his former college band. I won’t quote it in full, but it’s more of a crazy set of words. Among other things, there are calls not to go to college, to overthrow the government and nominate him, I quote, “for president of the Russian Empire.”

Former classmates wrote a statement to the dean of the college, and then a complaint to the police appeared. On November 2, 2022, representatives of law enforcement agencies came to Vlad’s home for an “inspection in connection with his threatening messages.” Then they came “gently”, but Vlad suffered a severe attack from this too.

“He was in such an excited state that he had to call an ambulance from the psychiatry clinic named after. Korsakov (medical institution at University Hospital No. 3, clinical base of Sechenov University), says the sister. — Vlad went there voluntarily. At the hospital his condition was corrected. He completed a course of therapy and was transferred to outpatient treatment. The psychiatrist prescribed him psychotropic medications, and his brother took them. When Vlad felt a little better, his parents took him to the sea. But even there he behaved strangely.

Well, after returning there was that same “heavy detention.” The court chose the harshest measure of restraint on the same day. Vlad was placed in a pre-trial detention center in Sergiev Posad.

The investigator, thank God, allows visits to the parents. They claim that their son’s condition is getting worse every time. He does not always speak coherently, gets confused, and begins to hear “voices.”

“The fellow inmates (there are 14 people in the cell) make fun of him, call him crazy, and claim that his parents will soon abandon him,” says his sister. “They locked him in the bathhouse alone, which caused him to have an attack. And all the time he is advised to write a confession. We contacted different authorities, but the answers came in the spirit of “his rights are not violated.”

Examination at the Center named after. Serbsky confirmed the presence of the disease in the student. I quote the expert opinion: “Currently, there is a temporary mental disorder in the form… This disorder deprives him of the ability to realize the actual nature and social danger of his actions and to direct them.”

Experts wrote that because of this current condition, they cannot answer the question of whether he was sane at the time of the crime. That is, he must first be seriously treated, and then they could question him about the message on the social network. The experts also wrote that he cannot participate in investigative actions and needs to be immediately sent for compulsory treatment “until he recovers from this painful state.” However, instead of the hospital, Vlad was taken back to the pre-trial detention center, to the same cell.

On July 5, 2023, the Sergiev Posad court decided to temporarily place Vlad in the hospital named after. Yakovenko and forbade him for the period of treatment to use communication means and communicate with anyone other than legal representatives and lawyers. But he has not yet been taken to any hospital.

— The head of the pre-trial detention center told us that he would not take him to the hospital for treatment. Yakovleva and wants our son to go to Smolensk, because he has to sit with the maniacs,” the father says in a trembling voice.

Smolensk PBSTIN (popularly known as Sychevka, where those who have committed serious violent crimes are placed by court decision) is one of the most terrible places. It’s true that mostly maniacs are kept there. Relatives do not want their son to end up in Sychevka. While they were complaining about the head of the pre-trial detention center, the court again extended the preventive measure…

The serious condition of the student does not slow down the investigation. It carried out a linguistic examination instead of the originally appointed psychological-linguistic examination, because supposedly all psychologists are busy and we have to wait too long. And linguists only did an analysis of words. An employee of the Institute of Forensic Science of the Center for Special Equipment of the FSB of Russia comes to the expected conclusion: “The publication under study contains a positive assessment, including the violent armed seizure of power in the Russian Federation, that is, a public justification of such actions.”

Specialists from the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia, who have reviewed the medical documents, are confident that the guy should be placed in a regular psychiatric hospital and treated. So why is he being tortured then? There seems to be an answer to this question, and many will not like it. Doctors think that there is some kind of attitude. If, on the basis of insanity, a person calls for doing something against the authorities, then he must either be declared sane and given the “full punishment”, or placed in PBSTIN for a long time (read – forever). But what can be achieved in this way? Probably, the relatives will take the position of “it’s better to admit everything,” and then sooner or later their loved one will still be released. And the investigation gets a “stick” and all sorts of bonuses from exposing the “enemy of the people.” If this continues, there will be more and more mental patients in Russian pre-trial detention centers.