Prosecutor Labutina asked to sentence Voloshin to two years of forced labor with 15% of his salary withheld in favor of the state and to ban him from holding public office for three years, while lawyer Fedor Akchermyshev asked for the “minimum possible fine”. Voloshin himself admitted guilt, apologized, and said it had been an argument with other users.
According to the prosecution, the case was prompted by two comments on VKontakte. The first, left at the end of July 2025 in the News community, stated that “Kyiv in three days” did not happen and that everything was happening “with the full approval of Russians”; the second appeared at the end of October 2025 in Typical Yekaterinburg under a post about replacing a banner with the letter Z on the building of the Ural State University of Economics with a media screen and boiled down to the phrase: “The Nazis in Germany also had a zyu and V”.
A criminal case was opened against Voloshin after, in February 2025, the same court had already fined him 30,000 rubles over six pictures in a VKontakte account with caricatures of participants in the so-called special military operation. At the time, Voloshin claimed the profile was open only to friends, while employees of Center “E” of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Sverdlovsk Region insisted that all users could see the page; according to Voloshin, these posts were later deleted, and he believes the account was hacked and privacy settings were changed without his knowledge.
On April 17, officers came to search him, after which he wrote a confession. On April 19, investigators asked to place him under arrest, but the court limited itself to house arrest, and on June 11 the investigator placed him under a travel ban.
OVD-Info wrote that when Voloshin was detained, he was shocked “near the buttock”, thrown face-first into gravel, and threatened with having a finger cut off in order to unlock the phone; at the police station, according to the outlet, he was hit on the head several times. Mediazona also reported a search of his garage, from which, according to the publication, two wrenches, a magnetic flashlight, and a diagnostic connector for a car later disappeared. Andrey Voloshin currently works as a taxi driver, and previously he was a driver at a plant connected with the defense industry.
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