Because he played Pokémon GO in a church and released a video about it, this Russian player could now face 3.5 years in prison.
Pokémon GO is a mobile game that is preferably played outdoors to visit PokéStops and find wild Pokémon. The Russian Pokémon player Ruslan Sokolovsky played the game in a church and made a video about it, which is now going against him. Several years in prison could be the penalty for that.
He knew what penalties exist for that
In August 2016, Sokolovsky uploaded the aforementioned video, in which he played Pokémon GO in a church and violated Russian laws – accusation: incitement to religious hatred. By the way, the band “Pussy Riot” was also imprisoned in 2012 for this accusation. The case of this punk band received worldwide attention.
At the beginning of his YouTube video, Sokolovsky showed a clip that pointed out what penalties exist for playing Pokémon GO in churches. However, he could not understand how someone could be punished for playing with their smartphone in a church. So he was not deterred and went to the “Church on the Blood” in Yekaterinburg to catch Pokémon. Orthodox prayers accompanied the attempt to catch a wild Wooper. At the end of the video, he mentions that he unfortunately could not catch the “rare Pokémon Jesus.” The video is available with English subtitles on his YouTube channel.
Shortly after he published the video, Sokolovsky was arrested and has been in custody since. Now his case is going to court, and according to Kotaku, he could face up to 3.5 years in prison.
Sokolovsky says that he may be an idiot but is not an extremist. “In the past, people were locked up for decades in camps for making jokes about communism and Stalin, for example. Today they want to imprison me for 3.5 years because I made obscene jokes about Orthodoxy and Patriarch Kirill. In my opinion, this is brutal and cruel. I do not understand how this is possible. But as we can see, it is indeed possible,” Sokolovsky writes in a statement for the Russian news site Meduza.
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