St Petersburg land registry employee sentenced to five years for comment on Belgorod residents sheltering from Russian missiles

Sergei Suptelya, an employee of Rosreestr, has been sentenced to five years in a general-regime penal colony under Russia’s law on military ‘fakes’ disseminated out of hatred and accompanied by the fabrication of evidence of guilt, under paragraphs ‘c’ and ‘e’, part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Russian Criminal Code. The sentence was reported by Mediazona.

Sergei Suptelya was charged over a message he posted on 16 October 2022 in the Telegram channel ‘Yura, Sorry’: ‘NATO has still not entered the war, but the residents of Belgorod are already sitting in basements, sheltering from Russian Orthodox missiles. Listen to this particularly vivid account of the situation from a local resident. The most interesting part comes at the end.’

Attached to the message was a video in which a man descends into a basement and explains that Belgorod residents have to hide not only from ‘Ukro-Slavic’ missiles but also from Russian missiles that are ‘not even the freshest’, which change trajectory, and from the operation of air defence systems. At the end of the video, the man says that there are still a couple of rooms where his ‘bitch of a mother-in-law and bastard of a father-in-law, who were so delighted that Crimea is ours’ would be sitting.

The prosecution had sought an eight-year sentence.

Sergei Suptelya is 48 years old and originally from Donetsk region, Ukraine. He had worked at Rosreestr in St Petersburg for the previous seven years. He has been held in custody since 29 October 2025.