What do you say when one of your own gets six years for a joke? If you’re a comedian in Russia, nothing.
In early February, a Moscow court sentenced stand-up comedian Artemy Ostanin to five years and nine months in prison for “inciting hatred” and “insulting the feelings of religious believers.” In March 2025, a district court remanded him to a pretrial detention center over remarks he made during the filming of the show “60 Seconds” in Moscow in December 2024. Ostanin joked about Jesus Christ and a legless man in the subway who had “blown himself up on a landmine.” Pro-Kremlin activists pounced on the routine, viewing it as a mockery of a soldier who lost his legs in Ukraine, though the comedian did not explicitly mention the war. Ostanin was not originally scheduled to perform but was invited onto the stage after the show had already begun. In court, he stated that during his arrest, he was beaten, his spine was broken, he was tortured with electric shocks, and his captors “tried to stab [him] several times.”
Within Russia, the comic community has been largely silent about Ostanin’s verdict, but some Russian performers in exile have weighed in. Their reactions — gathered by Meduza through interviews and culled from Telegram channels and social-media posts — range from cold fury to grief, and together they paint a portrait of a profession caught between the impulse to speak and the terror of what it now costs.
Alexander Nezlobin acknowledged that the joke itself didn’t land and that young comedians often reach for edgy material before they’ve developed the skill to pull it off. But he was categorical in his broader point: no words, in his view, warrant imprisonment. He compared Russia’s current reality to a crude movie in which a person is tried for a crime that does not exist — a scenario once confined to literature about censorship.
Ruslan Khalitov, who left Russia in 2022, framed the prosecution as less a campaign against comedians than a means of terrorizing society at large. He noted that according to the defense attorney, the state’s own expert analysis found nothing criminal in Ostanin’s remarks, yet the court disregarded that evidence, along with evidence that he was tortured in police custody.
Khalitov pointed out that at trial, other comedians from the same show testified that they had been warned about “forbidden topics,” but Ostanin may not have received that warning because he was a last-minute addition. Even during post-production, no one on the show’s editorial team considered the material problematic enough to cut. Presumably, this was because jokes about beggars and people with disabilities in the Moscow subway predate the war. Khalitov noted that comparable dark humor — including material in the style of comedian Jimmy Carr — circulates freely online and on Russian network television.
After the verdict, Khalitov posted an emotional message on social media criticizing the comedy community’s silence. He later clarified that his deeper concern is that it has become impossible in Russia even to express sympathy. He said he does not blame comedians still in the country, calling them victims of the same system. He placed responsibility squarely on Judge Olesya Medvedeva, who handed down the sentence, and recalled that the comedy scene had once shown solidarity in the case of Idrak Mirzalizade, a comedian who faced legal trouble for his material.
Kristina Bitkulova said Ostanin’s prison sentence is “barbarism.” She preempted the usual “well, he knew what country he lives in,” arguing that accepting such logic means accepting Russia as a second North Korea. She also noted a cruel catch-22: comedians living in Russia are too afraid to speak up, while émigrés are told they forfeited the right to comment when they left.
Irina Prikhodko said what shocked her most was the sheer mismatch between the sentence and what was supposedly a crime. Most comedians, she believes, are devastated — but those still in Russia can’t even say so, and are probably more afraid for themselves now than ever.
Garik Oganisyan, posting on his Telegram channel, wrote that no joke delivered from a stage is worth nearly six years of a person’s life. He found it particularly disturbing that many people would continue insisting nothing is wrong with the law or free speech in Russia — a state of affairs he described as “darkness and zombification.”
Tatyana Shchukina, who waited tables alongside Ostanin in Belgrade while he performed at local open-mic nights, recalled trying to dissuade him from returning to Russia to pursue comedy. She described the sentence as hell on Earth and declared that no one should have their life destroyed over words.
Konstantin Shirokov zeroed in on the unspoken loyalty test at the heart of the case. In today’s Russia, he wrote, comedians who pass as loyal allies can get away with criticizing local officials or even recording specials about the war; those who don’t pass can’t joke about anything remotely sensitive. The real issue isn’t what Ostanin said — it’s that the authorities could sense he wasn’t on their side.
Shirokov connected the case to a broader failure. Russia has spent centuries chasing Western benchmarks — building its own fleet, producing its own iPhones, creating its own Harry Potter — and falling short every time. What it actually needs to build, he argued, is a culture where people can make mistakes. Comedy runs on mistakes, he said. After all, that’s the whole point of open mics and trial sets. Ostanin made a bad joke, but because he was deemed disloyal, the price was nearly six years.
Katya Utkina wrote that the verdict left her questioning the purpose of her own stand-up: if the ever-expanding list of forbidden subjects means that telling the truth — the very point of comedy — can land a person in a penal colony, what’s the sense in performing? She recalled sharing street food with Ostanin near a comedy club in Moscow not long ago; now their only line of communication would be through the prison mail system.