The price of a grumble. Three Russians fined exactly $380 each by courts across the country for “discrediting” the army

Courts in three Russian cities have imposed identical fines of 30,000 roubles, or about $380, under the administrative article that prohibits “discrediting” the country's armed forces. The rulings were issued in Astrakhan, a city of about half a million people near the Caspian Sea in southern Russia; Kurgan, a smaller city around 1,600 km to the north-east, close to the border with Kazakhstan; and Lipetsk, some 400 kilometres south of Moscow. The cities are far apart and the cases are unconnected, except in their outcome.

One fine punished remarks made in the corridor of a drug-treatment clinic; another, messages posted in a Telegram group chat; the third, two social media comments blaming the military for a prolonged mobile internet outage. All three rulings were identified by Mediazona among recently published court decisions.

Leninsky district court in Astrakhan decided not to record what was actually said at all. On June 26, it fined Dilmar Usmanov over remarks about the military that he made in the corridor of the regional narcological dispensary, a state drug-treatment clinic. The ruling records the time, one minute to six in the evening, but not the words themselves, noting only that they were uttered “in the presence of police officers”.

Usmanov had been detained on June 15 under separate charges of petty hooliganism and resisting the police, for which he was later jailed for ten days; the trip to the clinic, most likely a routine intoxication check under those protocols, produced a third case along the way.

In court, Usmanov admitted his guilt; the rest of the ruling is largely a standard recitation of why the army’s deployment in Ukraine is “lawful”. In the end, Judge Aksenov fined him 30,000 roubles, the minimum the article allows.

In Kurgan, the offending words were preserved in full: they had simply been sitting in a group chat for more than three years. The city court fined Artem Khan, a press operator and vulcaniser at Mikron, a plant making industrial rubber goods, over a comment he posted in March 2023 in a Telegram chat called “Couch Troops”, a nod to the Russian equivalent of the armchair general. Police only logged the message in April 2026. On June 11, Judge Tatyana Sukhanova issued a ruling.

Khan had written about attending the funeral of a colleague’s nephew, a Wagner PMC mercenary dead at 31, asking when these “f…wits” would finally run out and wishing that the earth lie on the deceased “like glass wool”, a pun on the customary graveside blessing that the earth rest lightly. In the same message he called a friend a “moron” for promising to answer an enlistment summons and defend the motherland. He also marvelled at a classmate, a federal judge, who had never heard of Vladimir Osechkin, the exiled founder of the prison-abuse project Gulagu.net—which incidentally ceased its operations earlier today—reasoned that inmates probably torture themselves, and did not watch YouTube revelations.

In court, Khan, who has no prior record and, by his account, served in the army and is “a patriot of his Motherland”, said he had written the messages “in an inadequate state”, being very tired after a long shift at the factory, and had not meant anything bad about Wagner’s fighters. All the comments, he said, have since been deleted. Judge Sukhanova counted his confession and remorse, along with a permanent place of living and steady income, in mitigation, and imposed the minimum fine.

The Lipetsk case turned on the word “devils”. The city had spent two days without mobile internet in December 2025 when two comments appeared under a post about the outage in the VK community “Incident Lipetsk”. In the first, the author told a fellow commenter that the shutdowns happened however the military pleased: the “devils”, he wrote, switch the internet on and off over the heads of ordinary citizens. In the second, he proposed a remedy: suing the “military devils at the aerodrome” so they would stop turning on their jammers.

Police came across the comments the following March and traced the account through the mobile number it was registered to, which belonged to a local man with no previous record. A police-commissioned linguistic study then concluded that the comments negatively evaluated “persons designated in the text as ‘the military’”, the negative assessment being “expressed in coarse language”.

On April 16, Judge Karavaeva of the Oktyabrsky district court found that this amounted to “discrediting” the army and fined the man the same 30,000 roubles as the other two.