The Kirovsky District Court of Yekaterinburg sentenced 22-year-old Daniil Nuriyev to three years of forced labor in a case involving public calls for extremist activity, vandalism, and hooliganism committed by a group acting in prior collusion. The court’s press service told Mediazona this.
According to the prosecution, on July 2, 2025, Nuriyev painted 13 identical black inscriptions reading “ruslara ölüm” in Yekaterinburg’s Kirovsky district. Investigators say the phrase translates from Azerbaijani as “Death to Russians.”
Case materials say Nuriyev received the assignment and sketches from a longtime acquaintance, 24-year-old photographer Rishat Takayev from Bashkortostan. Takayev, in turn, had received them from an unidentified person using the Telegram account “Kristina Korallova”.
During questioning, Takayev said he had found that contact in one of the chats advertising illegal side jobs. According to him, in January 2025, “Kristina” offered him work setting fire to relay cabinets, but he refused and asked for easier work instead. Mediazona reports that he passed the same proposal on to Nuriyev, who also refused.
After that, starting in February, Takayev gave Nuriyev other assignments from the same source: while they were living in Ufa, he was told to paint two crossed triangles or the letter “B” on walls. According to Mediazona, Nuriyev made the drawings, while Takayev photographed them and kept watch. They were paid $100 to $150 in cryptocurrency to split between them.
Later, according to the prosecution’s version, “Korallova” proposed another job in Yekaterinburg: painting the words “ruslara ölüm.” Takayev reportedly could not translate the phrase, and the contact told him it was an “order from a drug shop.” He was paid $20 to $30 for the graffiti, but Nuriyev received nothing because Takayev disliked the result, saying the graffiti contained an error and used “the wrong font.”
Mediazona notes that the neo-Nazi organization NS/WP, which the FSB links to Ukraine, later claimed responsibility for the inscriptions. Nuriyev was detained on July 20, 2025. He spent about two and a half months in pretrial detention and was then released under a travel restriction. He admitted guilt, but stopped appearing in court in March, after which Judge Alexandra Yevladova twice ordered that he be brought in by force. On April 9, Nuriyev was sent back to pretrial detention.
Since late July 2025, Rishat Takayev has been held in a Yekaterinburg detention center on charges of aiding public calls for extremist activity, vandalism, and hooliganism by a group acting in prior collusion. Another defendant, Gleb Repyev, who at Nuriyev’s request watched the surroundings while the graffiti was being painted, was sentenced in March to one year of forced labor.