During a hearing held on Sept. 8 via video link, Russian political prisoner Alexei Gorinov complained to the Moscow City Court of nausea and dizziness. His request for help obtaining medical care was refused, according to a report by the independent Russian outlet SOTAvision. Gorinov, 65, is currently incarcerated in Penal Colony No. 10 in Russia’s Altai Krai. He suffers from a chronic lung condition and was hospitalized in June 2025 with acute bronchitis after doctors found signs of tuberculosis during a prisoner transfer.
Gorinov’s support group said that after he was transferred to Penal Colony No. 10, officials confiscated his medication and forced him to spend the winter in an unheated cell-type facility — a stricter form of confinement inside the prison system. He said ice formed on the inside of the window frame and that he had to wear a sweater at all times to keep from freezing. Gorinov said he was hospitalized a total of three times with bronchitis and later asked to be admitted again. Prison officials refused and instead moved him to a warmer cell.
At Tuesday’s hearing, the Moscow City Court considered an appeal by Gorinov’s defense against prosecutors’ refusal to reopen an investigation into his case after a United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Gorinov’s prosecution to be unlawful. His lawyer, Maria Tertukhina, said neither prosecutors nor Russian courts had addressed the UN experts’ findings, and in the end, the court upheld a March ruling by Moscow’s Tagansky District Court that found the prosecutors’ refusal lawful.
The Working Group adopted Opinion No. 78/2022 in November 2022. The document, reviewed by The Insider, identified violations of six articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and five provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — 11 legal provisions in all.
The Working Group found Gorinov’s detention arbitrary under three categories: he was prosecuted for lawfully exercising his rights to freedom of expression and participation in public affairs; the proceedings against him involved serious violations of his right to a fair trial; and he was discriminated against due to his political views.
The panel called for Gorinov’s immediate release, said he should be entitled to compensation, and urged that an independent investigation into the circumstances of his prosecution be opened. Russian officials did not implement any of those recommendations.
A Working Group’s opinion does not have the authority to overturn a conviction in a Russian court. However, in 2021, the plenary session of Russia’s Supreme Court said information contained in such international findings can provide sufficient grounds for prosecutors to open proceedings based on new circumstances when the violations identified cannot otherwise be remedied. The Russian Supreme Court also instructed judges to determine whether prosecutors had examined all the circumstances raised by an applicant.
Tertukhina argued that the prosecutors in Gorinov’s case had not carried out such a review, as was clear from the rejection letter they issued. She asked the court to overturn the Tagansky District Court’s ruling and order prosecutors to review the application in accordance with the law.
Gorinov also said he had previously appealed to prosecutors but had received no response.
“I would like to understand why I, having taken no one’s life, maimed no one, killed no one, and poisoned no one with drugs, but merely spoken out about the need to end the war and stood up for children who had been killed, was sentenced to seven years — and effectively 10 years when the second sentence is taken into account?”
Gorinov was first Russian citizen to receive a prison sentence under a law criminalizing what the Kremlin calls “fake news” about Russia’s armed forces, adopted shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The case stemmed from a March 15, 2022, meeting of the municipal council in Moscow’s Krasnoselsky District. Gorinov proposed holding a minute of silence for those killed in Ukraine and questioned whether it was appropriate to organize a children’s drawing contest while children were dying in a neighboring country.
In July 2022, he was sentenced to seven years in a general-regime penal colony. The Moscow City Court later reduced the sentence by one month.
In 2023, Gorinov was hit with another criminal case, this time on charges of “justifying terrorism.” The accusation was based on conversations he had with other inmates in a prison hospital about the explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge and Ukraine’s Azov and Kraken units. Gorinov said his cellmates had deliberately provoked him into discussing politics and that he had said nothing that justified terrorism.
In November 2024, a military court sentenced Gorinov to three additional years in a strict-regime penal colony over the new charges. Taking into account the unserved portion of his first sentence, the final punishment was set at five years in a strict-regime colony, extending his actual term of imprisonment by around one year.
