Punitive Psychiatry for a Dissident Janitor in Northern Russia: The Case of Igor Yakunichev

Five criminal cases have been launched against Igor Yakunichev, a resident of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District. In addition to three cases on charges of “disseminating fake news” about the Russian army and “condoning terrorism,” the security services added two more cases on the same charges. On 1 April, Yakunichev, who started the YouTube channel Infinity Is Not the Limit (about the lawlessness of the police and the courts), was forcibly hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic in the Tyumen Region.

Yakunichev’s relatives are convinced that he has been subjected to punitive psychiatry because of his consistent criticism of the current regime. For more than a year, investigators in Yamalia have tried to put Yakunichev in jail on charges of “disseminating fake news” about the military and “condoning terrorism.” However, even a court-appointed defense lawyer could not induce the 35-year-old Yakunichev to “admit everything and mitigate his plight” When the criminal cases began to fall apart, the defendant, who had no psychiatric diagnoses, was shipped off to a mental hospital.

“The police broke into our house twice”

The police started calling Igor Yakunichev and coming to his home (he lived with his mother and father in Pangody, a settlement in Yamalia with a population of 11,000) in early 2023.

“They would bring a ‘warning’ for him to sign, or they would summon him for an ‘interrogation’ and question him about his videos and posts. He started the [YouTube] channel when his family was cheated out of their housing,” says Igor’s relative Tatyana (whose name has been changed for security reasons). “Mother and father and son had lived for many years in two rooms in a barracks. Under the dilapidated housing resettlement program they were given a one-room flat. Igor fought against this lawlessness for many years, and he and his mother traveled many kilometers going to the courts. All to no avail. Then he began not only to take an interest in the state system but also to make and post videos about what is going on in Yamalia. He had come head to head with the injustice of the system back in 2015, when he worked at the property management company Our House. Another property management company controlled by them, Garant, was going bankrupt at the time, but for some reason all the employees at Our House were forced to apply to work shorter days (apparently, the whole business was being optimized). Igor refused [to sign], and after three months they up and fired him. He sued them and was reinstated, but he was pressured into leaving anyway.”

The local administration disliked the fact that Yakunichev fought for his own and other people’s rights. Consequently, despite his specialized secondary education, he could only find work as a janitor.

“He helped other residents get their cases through the courts. He became very adept in these matters: he knew all the laws well, especially the Housing Code. But there was no work in Pangody. (Yakunichev graduated from a technical college and worked as a mechanic — Sibir.Realii.) He was promised a job at Gazprom—he is a good mechanic—but then they admitted that they had hired ‘one of their own people,’ meaning somebody’s relative. And that’s how everything goes here. At the time, the cronyism made Igor quite angry, not the fact that he didn’t get the job: his janitor’s salary was enough for him. And in fact, he was already a blogger: he had bought a good camera and set up a studio for editing,” says Tatyana.

All of the Yakunichevs’ expensive electronic equipment was taken away by the police during their first “hard visit.”

“In the summer of 2023, [the police] broke into [the Yakunichevs’ flat] for real and slammed Igor onto the floor. His mother screamed, ‘His spine is broken! Don’t throw him on the floor!’ But what they did care, they hit him as hard as they could. Igor has had an implant instead of one vertebra since he was a student. When he was studying at Omsk University, he lost his keys and climbed through the window in the dormitory. The balcony was dilapidated: it broke off and he fell on his back. Since then he has had a bunch of diagnoses: cervical, thoracic and lumbar osteochondrosis. And when he is worried, he can have a seizure, and it’s like impossible for him to breathe. And so they wrestled this very unwell man, who is practically disabled, and threw him on the floor. Interestingly, the camera that Igor turned on continued to record even after his fall and almost the whole ‘wrestling match’ was captured. Igor later returned from the police station, restored the recording, and posted it on [his YouTube] channel. It made the police squeal to the high heavens!” says his buddy Ivan (whose name has been changed for his own safety). “In the background you can hear them yelling wildly, ‘Hands! Hands on your head!’ Who are they yelling at? A disabled man. And [you hear] Igor asking, ‘The cats! Watch out for the cats!’ so they don’t trample his pets. It’s just brutal!

After the police’s visit, Yakunichev learned that a criminal case on charges of “disseminating fake news” about the Russian army (per Article 207.3.1 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code) had been launched against him as early as late March 2023. He has published his first social media posts against the war at the very beginning of the war in February 2022.

“He reacted very harshly when someone would voice support for the war in his presence. He would not get into a fight, but he could try and persuade [the person] and talk [to them] until he achieved understanding or until he got tired himself. He was one of those people who never got used to the war. He understood the risks, but he still would stick his neck out. He vented everything to the policeman after [the latter] accused him of disturbing the peace at the [Russia Day] celebrations in June 2023. After [he said] these words about the unjust war with Ukraine, which he threw directly in the face of the ‘representative of the authorities,'” they targeted him specifically,” says Ivan. “They accused him of spreading ‘fake news’ about the army, threatening him with fifteen years in prison for posts on VKontakte about the Russian military’s crimes in Bucha. He and his mother filed complaints about the violations [of his civil rights], about how he had been roughed up during the arrest, how all their electronic equipment, even his mother’s computer and phone, had been cleaned out. Can you imagine, they still haven’t returned it!

As part of the first criminal case, the court banned Yakunichev from performing certain actions. In early March 2024, this case came to court. That was when it transpired that at least four more criminal cases had been launched against Yakunichev. Even prior to this, in the summer of 2023, Igor had been charged with an administrative offense for “discrediting” the army and fined thirty thousand rubles [approx. 300 euros]. Yakunichev and his family were notified about it.

“The grounds [for the charges] were ‘funny’: a video about a memorial featuring a T-54 tank in the village of Pangody. Local vatniks had drawn the letter Z on it. And Igor said in the video[‘s annotation] that it violated the law on the protection of cultural heritage objects,” says Tatyana.

Then, in November and December 2023, according to Tatyana, two more criminal cases were brought against Yakunichev under the same article of the Criminal Code (Article 205.2.2, “condoning terrorism”). He faces up to seven years in prison if convicted on these charges.

“The grounds [for the charges] were videos about the Free Russia Legion ([in which a Legionnaire expresses] gratitude for donations in the fight against ‘Putinist Russia’) and about the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant. They weren’t even his own videos, but reposts of other media on his VKontakte page,” says Tatyana. “Later, we learned of the case launched under the article on repeated ‘discrediting’ of the army (Article 207.3.1), and then they seemingly merged it with one of the cases under Article 205 into a single proceeding. But the number of cases is frightening, don’t you agree? He regularly received notifications that one video or another had been removed from his page ‘by decision of the prosecutor’s office.’ He did not restore them: although he is a principled man, he was just tired and fed up.”

His relatives are certain that Igor was deliberately driven to distraction with the interrogations and the notifications so that he would “blurt something out.”

“In June, the local beat cop showed up and made a completely delusional accusation. Allegedly, at the celebrations of Russia Day in June, [Igor] had been seen drunken in a public place and a complaint was filed against him. (That day, by the way, many people had seen him and testified that he was sober and orderly, so eventually the prosecutor’s office canceled this humiliating fine.) He videotaped this wannabe policeman, but he did not hold back and said everything he thought about this unjust war against Ukraine,” says a relative of Yakunichev’s. “I believe that this cop was the one who contributed testimony against him in the first case. Now it has gone to court, and Igor has been put away in a mental institution. Because they couldn’t put him under arrest: there was too little evidence of his guilt and ‘danger to society.’ But for some reason [the police] can take him to the madhouse themselves and obtain the court ruling retroactively. His mother has worn herself out filing complaints about such violations. It is urgent to replace the court-appointed lawyer with a normal one. Although [his mother] works as a cleaner, she is ready to pay all the money she has to a decent lawyer. Because the current one is a disaster: he hasn’t even been able to obtain a meeting with Igor once all month. [His family] receive paperwork about the cases against Igor months later, so they don’t know anything about the new cases against Igor.”

According to relatives, Yakunichev’s family is disappointed with the work of the court-appointed defense lawyer and now fears that Igor’s testimony will be extracted from him by torture in the psychiatric clinic, located in the village of Vinzili, Tyumen Region, a thousand kilometers from home.

“Read the reviews of the institution: former patients write such things it makes your hair stand on end—abuse and ill treatment by staff, medication administered without explaining to family and friends what the drug is and what it is used for,” says Ivan. “I think we need to get him out of there as soon as possible. Only a normal lawyer will help. By the way, this is not the first time [the authorities] have tried to subject him to punitive psychiatry. After his anti-war reposts, they were going to mobilize Igor. Yes, with his twisted spine and numbness in his chest! [Yakunichev’s family] went to the courts, got an independent forensics report, confirmed all the diagnoses, and it seemed to go away. And now this. I’m really afraid [the authorities] are not going to give up on this psychiatric hospitalization thing.”

Yakunichev’s relatives fear that the forensic psychological examination at the psychiatric clinic in the Tyumen Region will not be limited to the case and Igor will be kept there “indefinitely”.

The evidence in the last two criminal cases against Igor Yakunichev (on charges of violating Articles 280.1 and 207.3.2 of the Criminal Code) have still not been made available to his family.

“We found out from independent human rights activists—we don’t really know what he’s accused of,” says the relative. “Now they can’t even send you copies of previous cases, because during the search in April [the police] cleaned the Yakunichevs out: [they confiscated] their computer, which his mother had replaced, the telephone, even the TV set! They virtually robbed them so that they could do nothing at all, neither find a lawyer, nor send an electronic complaint.

Source: “Five criminal cases against a janitor: how the security services have been putting pressure on a dissident in northern Russia,” Sibir.Realii (Radio Svoboda), 30 April 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Koganzon for the heads-up. Thanks also to Nanny Kim for generously continuing to support this website with her monthly donations.