The Moscow Department of the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case on the dissemination of military «fakes» motivated by political hatred against 71-year-old religious figure and former vice-president of the Baptist World Alliance Yuri Sipko. This was reported in the telegram channel of the department.
The Baptist pastor is in the status of a suspect (paragraph «e» of part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). According to investigators, in March 2022, Sipko published “a video clip for an unlimited circle of people”, which, “according to a psychological and linguistic study, contains deliberately false information” about the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine.
The Investigative Committee added that Sipko's «illegal activity» was «identified and suppressed» by investigators and employees of the «E» Center, who monitored social networks. According to the department, the pastor and «his associates» in Kaluga were searched. «OVD-Info» writes that the security forces came with searches to the building of the Pentecostal church «Word of Life» and to its bishop Albert Ratkin — he is involved in the case as a witness.
The investigation also released operational footage showing the security forces ringing the bell at the door of the Kaluga Protestant Church of the Word of Life Evangelical Church on Heavenly Street. Its representatives spoke about regular claims from the authorities. In 2020, the parishioners were forbidden to use the temple by a court decision, as a result they pitched a tent nearby.
In the following shots, the security forces run into the panel house and find boxes from a disk with a 1999 BBC film called “Secrets of the Reich. Secrets of Nazism» with Adolf Hitler on the cover. In the video, they are blurred, the cameraman carefully focuses the camera on the boxes.
After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Sipko gave several interviews in which he criticized the invasion of Ukraine and called the actions of the Russian authorities aggression. “When they wanted to change power in the state of Ukraine in two days, they did not advance anywhere, they put tens of thousands of people, they put destroyed cities, hospitals, schools there and turned the Ukrainian land blooming and fragrant into a cemetery of human evil,” the pastor said in interview with the YouTube channel of the American Baptist Church «Spring of Life» in March 2022.
Updated at 18:05. Added information about searches in the building of the Word of Life Pentecostal Church and its Bishop Albert Ratkin.