The Moscow City Court sentenced 37-year-old Moscow region resident Georgy Pirogov to 23 years in a maximum-security penal colony on charges of treason. The report was published by Mediazona, citing a source familiar with the ruling. The court also imposed a fine of 800,000 rubles.
After the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, Pirogov moved to Georgia, where he worked as an industrial climber. In July 2024, he traveled to the city of Kungrad in Uzbekistan for a work assignment and then stopped communicating.
It later emerged that Pirogov was being held at Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention center. His relatives told the project Politzek-Info that he had been abducted. It remains unclear how he ended up in Russia when, according to his family, he had planned to return from Uzbekistan to Georgia.
The details of the charges have not been disclosed publicly. In August 2024, during an appeal against his arrest, the court said that Pirogov had admitted guilt and repented.
The outlet also recalled other cases in which Russians living in third countries disappeared and were later found in Russian detention centers. In 2023, Left Bloc activist Lev Skoryakin, who is accused of hooliganism in Russia, went missing in Kyrgyzstan and was later found in a Moscow jail. Skoryakin later managed to leave Russia and obtain asylum in Germany.
That same year, Rafail Shepelev, a member of the Artpodgotovka movement, disappeared in Tbilisi. Human rights defenders later found him in a detention center in Nizhny Tagil. Shepelev was then declared not criminally responsible and sent for compulsory treatment.