On Wednesday, November 22, 17-year-old Yegor Balazeikin was sentenced by a St. Petersburg military court to a harsh six-year prison term. The high school student, profiled by Le Monde in September, was found guilty of "attempting a terrorist act with the aim of destabilizing state institutions."

He was arrested in February, at the age of 16, when he threw a Molotov cocktail at the gates of the military recruitment office in Kirov, near his village in the St. Petersburg region. According to the prosecution, he had committed a similar act a few weeks earlier in St. Petersburg.

Yegor Balazeikin has never denied responsibility for the first of these two acts. He explained that it was because of his opposition to the war in Ukraine. Since his arrest, he has not relented in the face of the investigators’ attempts to coax him, nor in the face of threats. In a letter to his mother, his sole ambition was to "remain a man," both in Russia at war and in prison.

The prosecutor had requested a six-year prison sentence, relatively lenient in view of the verdicts handed down by the Russian justice system in recent months. On November 14, for example, a resident of Tolyatti received the same sentence for defacing posters showing "heroes" of the "special military operation" in Ukraine. Three days later, Alexandra Skochilenko, an artist from St. Petersburg, was sentenced to seven years in prison for pasting anti-war tags in a supermarket.

The court considered Yegor Balazeikin’s health status as a mitigating circumstance. The young man, who is passionate about history and karate, has been suffering since the age of eight from autoimmune hepatitis. It is an incurable and serious disease that has worsened since his detention in February.

Another mitigating circumstance is that he has always acknowledged the facts. On Wednesday, he once again explained his actions at the hearing. "I came to the conclusion that I could never approve of the presence of Russian armed forces on Ukrainian territory. I tried to talk about it to those around me, to help people realize this. But I realized that discussions were useless and I wanted to act differently."

In the defiant posture that he has taken throughout the hearings, standing with clenched fists, he concluded his last words to the court by quoting Alexei Gorinov, an imprisoned opponent: "Do you really need this war?" According to journalists who were there, the prosecutor, Vladimir Mikhailov, had fallen asleep after delivering his closing arguments. "I don’t expect to be understood or acquitted here," said the young man. "My conscience will judge me."

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