Nikita Uvarov, a teenage boy from Kansk in Siberia, was sentenced to five years in jail and fined 30 000 rubles for blowing up a representation of the FSB building on the videogame Minecraft.

The court convicted him of exposing a virtual recreation of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation ( FSB) on Minecraft by blowing it up.  This virtual terrorist act has been seen as a horrible violation of the penal code of Russia, and that’s why authorities arrested him. Minecraft is a building-bloc video game where you can build or replicate anything.

Uvarov had two friends, Bogdan Andreev and Denis Mikchalienka. They were already arrested in 2020 for many reasons. They distributed leaflets to their classmate at school, claiming that the Russian authorities were bad. FSB officers found weird discussions on their phones and claimed that the culprits also had illegal weapons.

The two other teens finally agreed to admit to their crimes, and the judge decided to reduce their sentence dramatically. Unfortunately, Nikita never admitted that he was a terrorist, and unlike his classmates, the judge decided to send him to prison for five years. Uvarov said, “I am not a terrorist,” as he was escorted out of the courtroom.

FSB building