Minecraft as training for terrorism?

Can you imagine going to jail for something you did in a computer game? In Russia apparently it can, as it happened to a 16-year-old boy named Nikita Uvarov. Nikita, together with his friends Bogdan Andrejev and Denis Mihajlenko, were arrested already in 2020 for the type of activities that, according to the law enforcement authorities, were supposed to pose a threat to national security. Andrejev and Mihajlenko pleaded guilty and received a suspended sentence, but Denis did not, so he was sentenced to five years in prison for "training for terrorist activities".

And what did teenagers do to be labeled as terrorists? The biggest charge that will get Denis out of prison after serving 21 years is that he planned to blow up a mock-up of the building of the Russian internal security agency FSB (the successor to the KGB, founded in 1995 by then-President Boris Yeltsin) in the Minecraft game. But these "terrorist intentions" were actually of secondary importance. The teenagers were detained in the summer of 2020 for distributing leaflets in support of the Moscow mathematician and anarchist activist Azat Miftakov, who was arrested a year earlier for alleged vandalism.

At the age of 16, the boys almost certainly had no intention of blowing up any building, let alone the successor building of the infamous KGB, but the Russian security authorities and the judiciary apparently do not have much of an ear for teenage antics... And Denis will pay dearly for it...

Source: The Guardian, the image is symbolic

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