Former Kurchatov Institute physicist Dmitry Bogmut, convicted over anti-war comments, loses consciousness for the second time during prison roll call

Former Kurchatov Institute employee Dmitry Bogmut has once again lost consciousness during roll call at his penal colony, his support group reported on 27 June.

Dmitry Bogmut had previously fainted during roll call on 9 June. His blood sugar level was found to be elevated after the first incident and even higher following the second. He has not yet been examined by an endocrinologist because the specialist is on leave. Prison authorities have exempted him from morning roll calls for six days.

‘For now, they have attributed it to vegetative-vascular dystonia of some kind,’ his support group wrote. Vegetative-vascular dystonia is not recognised as an independent medical diagnosis but rather as a term used to describe a range of symptoms that may be associated with different medical conditions.

Dmitry Bogmut, who suffers from severe short-sightedness, was also examined by an ophthalmologist. He has been instructed not to lift heavy objects or carry out work involving small parts.

In January, Dmitry Bogmut was sentenced to seven years in a general-regime penal colony. He was convicted of disseminating ‘military fakes’ motivated by hatred under paragraph ‘e’, part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Russian Criminal Code. The charges were based on more than one hundred comments about the war that he posted on the computer forum iXBT in a closed politics section accessible to around twelve users, some of whom supported Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. He was sent to serve his sentence at Penal Colony No. 5 in the settlement of Metallostroy, near St Petersburg.

Before his arrest, Dmitry Bogmut worked as a laboratory technician in neutron physicochemical research at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, which forms part of the National Research Centre Kurchatov Institute.