A Russian court on Friday sentenced former prominent Orthodox monk Nikolai Romanov to seven years in the gulag for “inciting hatred” over promoting COVID-19 conspiracy theories and urging his followers to defy government lockdowns meant to contain the virus, the AP reports.
Weird how the kind of shit Russian trolls stirred in the United States during the worst of the pandemic isn’t cool with the Putin regime inside Russia itself. Granted the American MAGA freaks didn’t need much help given the President of the United States at the time was encouraging them to defy state-level lockdowns and masking orders, but the Russian propaganda definitely didn’t hurt their suicidal cause either. Then again Romanov did say Putin was a “traitor to the Motherland” and a puppet of a Satanic “world government,” so maybe that was the bigger issue than the COVID denialism. This won’t be Romanov’s first time in the clink, as the 67 year-old former Soviet cop did 13 years for robbery and murder and only joined the church after his release.