On Monday, a court in the city of Petrozavodsk extended the historian’s sentence at the prosecutors’ request.Dmitriyev spent decades locating and exhuming mass graves of people killed under Stalin’s rule and set up a memorial to them in the Karelia region of the north-west of Russia.
He was initially arrested in 2016 and charged with possessing child sexual abuse images over several nude photos of his adopted daughter that he said he took to monitor her growth. A court acquitted him in 2018. He was sentenced to three and a half years in jail in July 2020, most of which he had already spent in pretrial detention.As a result, the supreme court in Karelia issued a new sentence in September 2020, sending him to a high-security penal colony for 13 years.