![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/imgs-3.jpg\")
<\/p>\nDays after the United States condemned Russian persecution of religious groups, Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses announced that agents arrested five more Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses for their faith.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A Russian court in Krasnoyarsk sentenced 47-year old Andrey Stupnikov to prison for six years, Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses spokesman Jarrod A. Lopes said in a press release. Stupnikov had spent almost eight months in pretrial detention and four months under house arrest during the investigation and trial, the press release said.<\/p>\n
A court in Kursk also imprisoned four other members of Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses, Lopes announced. Andrey Andreyev was sentenced to four and a half years, Andrey Ryshkov was sentenced to three years, Artem Bagratyan was sentenced to two and a half years and his wife Alevtina Bagratyan was sentenced to two years.<\/p>\n
\u201cRussian authorities are targeting Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses based on tragically poor intel,\u201d Lopes said in a statement. \u201cThe authorities\u2019 mistaken views are obvious not only by their testimonies in court but also by the manner in which they raid the Witnesses\u2019 homes. FSB and local police typically arrive by the van-load in full combat gear\u2014helmets, bullet proof vests, and automatic weapons\u2014merely to arrest peaceful family men and women, including frail elderly believers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNumerous international human rights actors have decried Russia\u2019s baseless assault on Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses,\u201d Lopes added. \u201cWe hope the Russian authorities will soon come to know what most of the world knows about Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses: they are societally responsible Christians who want nothing more than to have the freedom to worship in Russia as they do in over 200 other lands.\u201d<\/p>\n
News of the imprisonments came only days after Secretary of State Antony Blinken\u2019s team condemned Russian persecution of minority groups.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Russian government\u2019s criticism of the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance (IRFBA) is an attempt to divert attention and deflect accountability from the dire religious freedom issues in the country,\u201d a State Department official said in late May, according to the Washington Examiner. \u201cReligious minority groups, especially Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses, are continually subjected to physical abuse, harassment, and imprisonment on account of their beliefs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Russian ambassador-at-large Gennady Askaldovich told the upper house of Russia\u2019s legislature in late May that \u201cthe religious factor is increasingly becoming a serious foreign policy weapon,\u201d the Examiner reported, adding that \u201cthis structure is absolutely unacceptable for us as it is an openly U.S.-controlled interstate mechanism potentially capable of using sanctions against countries they don\u2019t like.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRussia continues to trend in the wrong direction on religious freedom, a freedom enshrined in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights,\u201d the State Department official told the Examiner. \u201cSince the launch of IRFBA in February 2020, the United States has joined like-minded partners in challenging those undermining religious freedom, including governments and non-state actors attempting to politicize and oppress religious communities. These efforts complement existing work on religious freedom within the United Nations and other competent multilateral and regional organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Russia and Crimea, there have been 227 criminal cases involving 492 Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses, Lopes said in the press release. Fifty-seven of these Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses have been imprisoned, 33 are under house arrest, and 1,456 homes of Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses have been raided since 2017, the press release said.<\/p>\n
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Days after the United States condemned Russian persecution of religious groups, Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses announced that agents arrested five more Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses for their faith. A Russian court in Krasnoyarsk sentenced 47-year old Andrey Stupnikov to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5474,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5475,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5473\/revisions\/5475"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}