Novaya Gazeta Europe, citing the hieromonk’s sister Svetlana, reported that Judge Zhasulan Khusainov of Court No. 2 in Almaty’s Medeu District sentenced Vorontsov to four years in a penal colony, a fine of 86,500 tenge, and 39,500 tenge in court costs. Of the six years imposed, the court applied an amnesty announced by the Kazakh authorities on the occasion of the adoption of the new Constitution.
The criminal case against the hieromonk was opened in the fall of 2025 on the basis of testimony from two secret witnesses. At first, he was charged with running a drug den and sent to pretrial detention, and before the trial began, the charge was reclassified as possession of prohibited substances.
The proceedings were held behind closed doors. The testimony of one of the secret witnesses was excluded from the case materials because the court could not establish that this person existed; the second, according to the defense, may have been a security officer, but this could not be verified because his name was withheld from the participants in the trial.
Lawyer Galym Nurpeisov said after the verdict was announced that the investigation had not examined how or when the prohibited substance ended up in the priest’s home on the outskirts of Almaty. He also said that there was insufficient evidence to find anyone guilty; in May, Vorontsov was placed in a specialized psychiatric hospital, where no drug addiction was found.
Until February 2022, Yakov Vorontsov was a cleric of the Kazakhstan Metropolitan District of the Russian Orthodox Church, spoke out against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and introduced the Kazakh language into liturgical services. In 2023, he called on Orthodox Kazakhs to “step away from Patriarch Kirill, who is destroying the Church”, and proposed creating a metochion of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Kazakhstan, after which the Astana Diocese banned him from ministry and stripped him of his rank. According to the publication, he continued to seek registration of a community outside the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, and the earlier case of “inciting hatred” was dropped for lack of corpus delicti.
As Novaya Gazeta Europe wrote, on February 13 Vorontsov was first placed under administrative arrest and then sent to pretrial detention: three days earlier, the court was supposed to hear his administrative lawsuit seeking registration of the community, but the hearing did not take place for unexplained reasons. In mid-September, after the court was declared closed, he began a protest hunger strike and did not admit guilt; the defense intends to appeal the sentence.
The proceedings, according to the publication, are under the control of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, and its head, Yevgeny Zhovtis, considers the prosecution of the hieromonk politically motivated.
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