Russia: three years for a woman who offered a stranger a curse-removal rite, asked her to hand over her life savings to be blessed, and stole the 240,000 roubles

Proceedings

1. 2025-02-12 · conviction and sentence at first instance

   Pavlovsky District Court, Voronezh Oblast, Russia (Павловский районный суд Воронежской области). The defendant, anonymised in the published judgment as ФИО1, was convicted of theft causing significant damage to a citizen under paragraph (v) of part 2 of article 158 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and sentenced to two years six months' deprivation of liberty. Under article 70 the unserved portion of an earlier sentence from the Kuzminsky District Court of Moscow of 26 March 2021 was partially added, making three years, which was then replaced under part 2 of article 53.1 with three years' compulsory labour and ten per cent of earnings withheld to the state. The court found that on 21 October 2024 she approached a woman she did not know in the street in Pavlovsk and offered to perform a rite to remove a curse; the victim agreed and invited her home; and that in order to steal the money she asked the victim to hand over all her savings so that an invented rite could be performed over them. The victim handed over 240,000 roubles, which the defendant then took from the kitchen of the victim's flat.

Documented coercion mechanisms

• an unsolicited offer in the street to perform a curse-removal rite
• the instruction that the victim's money must be handed over to have the rite performed over it
• the invented rite used to obtain access to the victim's home and savings