Yegor Balazeykin. Photo: Dmitry Tsyganov
A court in the city of St. Petersburg has rejected a petition seeking the early release of a teenager jailed for attempting to set fire to two military recruitment offices, local news website MR7 reported on Friday.
The defence had asked for Yegor Balazeykin, now 19, to be released on health grounds. Balazeykin suffers from congenital autoimmune hepatitis, an incurable disease that causes liver fibrosis, which has advanced rapidly during his time in prison.
Aged just 17 at the time, Balazeykin was sentenced to six years in a juvenile detention centre in November 2023 on terror charges after he attempted to attack two military recruitment offices with Molotov cocktails that failed to ignite.
However, Balazeykin has since been transferred to an adult facility in St. Petersburg and has been deemed “likely to commit terrorism, extremism and arson” by prison staff, despite his disability, according to independent news outlet RusNews.
A support group for Balazeykin said that the presiding judge, Marina Rudenko, had refused a request for additional medical examination from Balazeykin’s defence lawyer, who argued that the court was basing its conclusions around Balazeykin’s state of health on data from 2022 and 2023.
Balazeykin’s mother, Tatyana Balazeykina, told local outlet Bumaga that prison staff had only performed an ultrasound and refused to conduct a test that would reveal whether her son had cirrhosis, which is an advanced stage of liver fibrosis.
Balazeykin’s defence team plans to appeal the ruling.
