The Moscow City Court sentenced Georgi Pirogov, a 37-year-old resident of the Moscow region, to 23 years in a high-security colony, MediaZona reported, citing a source familiar with the details of the decision. The court also imposed a fine of 800 thousand rubles on him.
After the beginning of the great war between Russia and Ukraine, Georgy Pirogov left for Georgia, where he worked as an industrial climber. In July 2024, he went on a business trip to the city of Kongrad in Uzbekistan and stopped communicating. It later emerged that Pirogov had been in the Matroskaya Tishina pre-trial detention center in Moscow. Pirogov’s loved ones, I mentioned to the Politzek-Info project that he was kidnapped.
It is not known exactly how Pirogov, who, according to relatives, was planning to return from Uzbekistan to Georgia, ended up in Russia. Details of the accusation were also not revealed. In August 2024, when considering a complaint against Pirogov’s arrest, it was announced that he pleaded guilty and repented.
There are several known cases of Russians living in third countries who disappeared and were later found in Russian pre-trial detention centres. Thus, in 2023, Left Bloc activist Lev Skoryakin, accused of hooliganism in Russia, disappeared in Kyrgyzstan, after which he was found in a remand detention center in Moscow. Skoryakin was able to leave Russia and obtain asylum in Germany. In the same year, Rafail Shepelev, a member of the Artpodgotovka movement, disappeared in Tbilisi. He was found by human rights activists in the pre-trial detention center in Nizhny Tagil. Shepelev was declared insane and sent for compulsory treatment.