Georgy Pirogov fled Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. He later vanished on a job in Uzbekistan and resurfaced in a Moscow jail. Now he’s been sentenced to 23 years.

Source: Mediazona

The Moscow City Court has sentenced Georgy Pirogov, a 37-year-old man from the Moscow region, to 23 years in a maximum-security penal colony, the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona reported, citing a source familiar with the ruling. The court also fined him 800,000 rubles.

After Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, Pirogov moved to Georgia, where he worked as an industrial climber. In July 2024, he traveled to Kungrad, Uzbekistan, on a work assignment and dropped out of contact. It later emerged that he was being held at the Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention center in Moscow.

People close to Pirogov say he had planned to return to Georgia from Uzbekistan. How he ended up in Russia is unknown. They told the Politzek-Info project that he had been abducted.

The details of the charges brought against Pirogov have not been disclosed. At an August 2024 hearing on his appeal against his detention, the court said only that he had admitted guilt and expressed remorse.

There have been several known cases of Russians living in third countries disappearing and later turning up in Russian pretrial detention centers. In 2023, Lev Skoryakin, an activist with the Left Bloc who is charged with hooliganism in Russia, disappeared in Kyrgyzstan and was later found in a Moscow pretrial detention center. Skoryakin managed to leave Russia and won asylum in Germany. That same year, Rafail Shepelev, a member of the Artpodgotovka movement, disappeared in Tbilisi. Human rights advocates found him in a pretrial detention center in Nizhny Tagil. Shepelev was declared legally insane and committed to compulsory psychiatric treatment.

At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.

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Georgy Pirogov fled Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. He later vanished on a job in Uzbekistan and resurfaced in a Moscow jail. Now he’s been sentenced to 23 years.

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