Russian man sentenced to 12 years for online harassment that drove schoolgirl to attempt suicide
The Novgorod District Court sentenced Mikhail Shalimov, 21, to 12 years in prison for driving a schoolgirl from Ufa to attempt suicide.
According to a press release from the court, Shalimov met 16-year-old Diana, from Ufa, on VK, in a community dedicated to the game Minecraft. A conflict between them escalated into months of harassment.
Using publicly available sources, Shalimov gathered information about Diana, including her home address, phone number, school, and relatives. Over six months, he threatened her directly, sent bomb threats in her name, and created a channel where he posted videos of animal abuse. He also called Diana’s parents at their workplaces and, posing as her father, reported a murder to police.
He demanded that the schoolgirl kill herself, according to reports, promising to stop the harassment only if she did. She attempted suicide as a result.
The court found Shalimov guilty of driving a minor to attempt suicide (Part 2 of Article 110 of Russia’s Criminal Code) and of orchestrating knowingly false reports of terrorist attacks (Part 2 of Article 207 of the Criminal Code).
This is not the first time driving someone to suicide over the internet has led to an actual prison sentence in Russia. A whole series of such convictions has been linked to so-called “death groups,” which came under public discussion in 2016 after the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta published a high-profile report on a game called ”Blue Whale”.
Filipp Budeikin, the first person convicted, was sentenced in 2017 to three years and four months in prison. A year later, another curator of the game, Ilya Sidorov, received a three-year sentence. Punishments in similar cases grew noticeably harsher after that.
By 2019, Alexander Glazov, another former curator of the game, was already serving a six-year sentence. He was released early after going to fight against Ukraine. By 2024, he was speaking at patriotism lessons in schools. In 2025, Ilya Pogiblov, the creator of the “Blue Whale” public page, was convicted in one of the most recent “death group” cases and sentenced to nine years in prison.
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