Hieromonk Iakov Vorontsov has been sentenced to four years in a penal colony in Kazakhstan. The priest, who had previously criticised the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), was found guilty of drug possession.
This was reported by Novaya Gazeta.
The trial was held behind closed doors, and the judge excluded the testimony of one of the anonymous witnesses from the case after the prosecution failed to prove that the witness even existed. Another witness may have been a law enforcement officer, according to the defence. This cannot be verified, as the identities of the witnesses who testified have never been disclosed to the public.
The case was opened last autumn on the basis of testimony from anonymous witnesses who allegedly visited the hieromonk’s home to take drugs. One of them visited the priest carrying a hidden video camera.
Vorontsov was arrested on suspicion of “operating a drug den”. He spent the following several months in pretrial detention. Shortly before the trial, the allegation that Vorontsov had been running a drug den was dropped, but he was instead charged with “possession of prohibited substances”.
As LF previously reported, Iakov Vorontsov is known for his anti-war stance and public criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2024, Vorontsov was suspended from priestly ministry and defrocked. Criminal proceedings were also brought against him under Article 141 of Kazakhstan’s Criminal Code, which covers “incitement to social, national, tribal, racial, class or religious hatred, and insulting the national honour and dignity or religious feelings of citizens”. The investigation was subsequently discontinued on the grounds that no criminal offence had been committed.
Vorontsov is known to have attempted several years ago to establish an Orthodox Church in Kazakhstan independent of the Moscow Patriarchate. He twice submitted applications for registration to the Ministry of Justice, but both were rejected.
We previously reported that the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) had added Iakov Vorontsov, a priest defrocked by the Russian Orthodox Church, to its international database of individuals persecuted for their religious beliefs.
