Artemy Ostanin in court in Moscow, 19 March 2025. Photo: Moscow Courts Service, Telegram

A Moscow court has placed a stand-up comedian in pretrial detention for two months after he was charged with “extremism” for a joke he told during a show last month, Moscow’s Investigative Committee announced on Wednesday.

Ostanin’s lawyer Veronika Polyakova told the court that her client had suffered a fractured spine since being taken into custody. “A crime was committed as my client was beaten in detention,” Polyakova said.

According to investigators, Ostanin, who was detained in Belarus on Tuesday and extradited to Russia, made “hostile remarks about those who had suffered injury and were no longer able to work” during a stand-up performance in Moscow last month.

Ostanin, a relatively obscure stand-up comic, became the subject of a viral backlash after telling a joke about a disabled veteran who had “blown himself up on a mine”, which was denounced by both the ultranationalist movement Zov Naroda and pro-war forum Abzats.

Despite those reporting the incident claiming that Ostanin had been referring to a veteran of the war in Ukraine, the comedian himself told news channel Ostorozhno Novosti that he had never even mentioned the so-called “special military operation” and that the joke was about “a beggar on the Metro who has been drifting around without legs for 20 years”.

Sergey Zaytsev of Zov Naroda told news outlet Podyom that the reference to a mine would have made the audience “associate it with veterans of the conflicts in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Chechnya”, an opinion that was shared by the country’s Investigative Committee.