Russian Blogger Who Made Pokemon Go Video Inside A Church Now Faces Prison

image credit: Sokolovsky!/YouTube

Some places just aren't meant for catching Pokemon. A Russian man who was arrested in 2016 for making a Pokemon Go video inside a church has just finished his trial last Friday and is now facing the possibility of spending a few years in prison.

Back during summer last year, blogger Ruslan Sokolovsky entered the Church of All Saints at the east of Moscow to play Pokemon Go. He also made a video questioning Russia's laws against "inciting religious hatred" and against mocking the Orthodox church while playing the game in the church. You can watch Sokolovsky making his rant in the video in question down below:

Sokolovsky was arrested shortly after posting the video on YouTube and has been in detention ever since his arrest. His trial ended with his prosecutors asking the court for him to pay for his crime by spending three years and a half in prison.

"I may be an idiot, but I am by no means an extremist," the blogger said in a statement on news site Meduza. "A long time ago, people were imprisoned in camps and for longer terms – not for 3.5 years, but for decades – because they [foully] joked, for example, about communism and about Stalin. Now it turns out that they want to imprison me for 3.5 years [in real terms] because [I] obscenely joked about Orthodoxy and about Patriarch Kirill. For me, this is savagery and barbarism. I do not understand how this is at all possible. Nevertheless, as we have seen, it is quite possible indeed."

Sokolovsky's sentence is due later this week, but it's very likely that the blogger will be facing a few years in prison for the video he had uploaded.

With the Russian government aggressively implementing its law defending religion, Pokemon Go gamers in the country should now take a step back before deciding to capture and make videos while playing the game in any church.

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