Five Believers Arrested After Raid Against Jehovah's Witnesses in Saratov

On September 3 and 4, 2025, law enforcement officers conducted searches at at least five addresses of Jehovah's Witnesses in Saratov and the village of Anastasino. As part of a new criminal case, five believers aged 29 to 58 were detained.

The raid began at about 6 p.m. Law enforcement officers broke into the home of one believer's family at 1:30 a.m. The Criminal Procedural Code allows a search at night only under urgent circumstances, but in this case the court had given permission at the end of August to carry out the search. FSB officers seized electronic devices and storage media, as well as personal notes.

After the searches, law enforcement officers took Mikhail Proshenkov, Aleksey Kazakov, Aleksandr Akelin, Filipp Ombysh and Sergey Yefremov to the station. The wives and children of the believers were also interrogated. On Friday, September 5, the Frunzenskiy District Court placed Yefremov under house arrest, and sent the rest of the detainees to a pretrial detention center.

In the Saratov Region, 20 of Jehovah's Witnesses have already faced prosecution for their faith: seven of them received prison sentences, and three — Feliks Makhammadiyev, Konstantin Bazhenov, and Rustam Seidkuliev — were stripped of their citizenship and expelled from the country.