Man convicted of preparing to set fire to military facility dies two weeks after release; courts spent a year refusing to free him despite terminal illness

Sergei Sviridov, a 46-year-old resident of Altai Krai, died on 12 June. He had been convicted of preparing to set fire to a military facility. Mediazona reported his death.

Since spring 2025, he had applied to the courts three times for release on grounds of terminal illness, but was refused each time. As Mediazona noted, the Krasnoyarsk Regional Court eventually ordered his release on 26 May — two weeks before his death, by which point Sergei Sviridov was no longer able to walk or breathe without assistance.

Sergei Sviridov was detained in Barnaul in January 2024. According to an FSB press release, he had ‘established contact with a terrorist paramilitary organisation’ and was preparing to set fire to a Ministry of Defence facility using Molotov cocktails.

He was sentenced to seventeen years and seven months’ imprisonment. He began serving the first three years of his sentence at a prison in Minusinsk, Krasnoyarsk Krai. In March 2025, he was diagnosed with a malignant tumour and transferred to a prison hospital in Krasnoyarsk.

A doctor who testified in court said that ‘surgical treatment and chemotherapy had produced no results, and the disease is currently progressing’.

According to staff at the oncology unit of Krasnoyarsk Prison Tuberculosis Hospital No. 1, his condition had become critical by the end of May: he was unconscious and unable to breathe independently due to multi-organ failure, ‘barely able to speak’ and ‘unable to walk even with assistance’.

‘Sviridov’s condition is deteriorating; he is inoperable and requires medication to manage his pain […] If he is released from prison, he will be transferred to a hospice,’ the court ruling quoted the medical staff as saying.

They noted that Sergei Sviridov’s tumour was included in the government’s list of serious illnesses that prevent a person from serving a custodial sentence, under item 8.

Despite his confirmed terminal diagnosis, Sergei Sviridov was refused release three times: once by Judge Alexander Aksyutenko and twice by Judge Marina Poptsova of the Zheleznodorozhny District Court of Krasnoyarsk. A further refusal on appeal in early 2026 was upheld by Judge Alexandra Lugovkina of the regional court.

She justified the decision on the grounds that a terminal illness included on the official list merely gives a court the option to release a prisoner; it does not oblige it to do so.

‘At present, Sviridov is receiving all necessary treatment [at the prison hospital], which is essentially the same treatment he would receive at another medical institution outside prison; no other treatment is indicated,’ Judge Lugovkina’s ruling stated. She also noted that Sergei Sviridov had no family and had lived alone before his arrest, meaning that there was no one to care for him outside prison.

In spring, a new appeal was heard by Judge Larisa Drozdova. She found that the previous judges’ arguments concerning the possibility of treatment at the prison hospital could not have served as grounds for refusing his release. Sergei Sviridov ‘cannot be held in a correctional facility on standard grounds, as he requires constant care and symptomatic therapy’, Drozdova added.