Russia put a blogger on trial Monday on charges of offending religious believers and fomenting hatred by posting a video online that showed him hunting Pokemons in a church.<\/p>\n
Ruslan Sokolovsky, 22, faces up to seven years in prison over the YouTube video of him zapping Pokemons on a smartphone in a Russian Orthodox church in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg.<\/p>\n
The video which Sokolovsky posted in August 2016 has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on YouTube.<\/p>\n
He has pleaded not guilty in the case which has been compared to that of the Pussy Riot punk art group, whose 2012 “punk prayer” in a Moscow cathedral led to two-year prison terms.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t aim to offend anyone,” Sokolovsky said in court in a video broadcast by Life News, adding that he was ready to apologise if anyone was offended.<\/p>\n
He said he created the videos “with critical and polemical aims”, describing himself as an atheist.<\/p>\n
The Russian Orthodox Church has accused him of blasphemy over the stunt in a church built on the spot where the Bolsheviks shot Russia’s last tsar and his family in 1918.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t ask these people to watch my video clips” Sokolovsky told journalists during a break.<\/p>\n
“Who is the Russian Orthodox Church that I have to publicly repent in front of them?”<\/p>\n
Sokolovsky spent several months in prison ahead of the trial, though he is now under house arrest.<\/p>\n
Amnesty International has condemned the charges against him as “farcical” and called him a prisoner of conscience.<\/p>\n
He also faces a separate charge of illegally possessing a “spy pen” with a recording function, which was found in a search of his flat.<\/p>\n
In court, he said that the pen is widely available to buy and unsuitable for covert recording.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Russia put a blogger on trial Monday on charges of offending religious believers and fomenting hatred by posting a video online that showed him hunting Pokemons in a church. Ruslan Sokolovsky, 22, faces up to seven years in prison over the YouTube video of him zapping Pokemons on a smartphone in a Russian Orthodox church […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[5005,5006],"class_list":["post-301428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-odd","tag-pokemon-game","tag-russian-blogger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=301428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=301428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=301428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=301428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}