Russian Convicted for Playing Pokémon GO in Church

In Russia, playing Pokémon GO can be a crime that comes with years of jail time.

On Thursday, a Russian court convicted a 22-year-old video blogger on charges of "inciting hatred" and "blasphemy" for sharing a video of himself playing Pokémon GO at a prominent Orthodox cathedral in Yekaterinburg, the fourth largest city in the country.

According to the Associated Press, Judge Yekaterina Shoponyak sentenced Ruslan Sokolovsky to a suspended term of 42 months in prison, stating that the defendant had insulted the religious communities by “attributing to Jesus Christ the qualities of a reanimated zombie" in a video originally uploaded in August 2016. Sokolovsky, a popular YouTube vlogger with more than 300,000 subscribers to date, has been placed under both house arrest and penitentiary detention since being taken into custody in September.

In the footage, Sokolovsky can be seen playing the augmented reality game at the Church of All Saints, a historically significant cathedral in western Russia, with the background music featuring segments from the Pokémon Go theme song and excerpts of an Orthodox prayer. At the end of the video, Sokolovsky says that he failed to catch “the rarest Pokémon that you could find there -- Jesus.” The video has been viewed more than two million times on YouTube.

Despite the guilty verdict and conviction, the news of a suspended sentence was met with sighs of relief on the social media in Russia, where state censorship has led to prosecution of journalists and bloggers in recent years. Just a few years ago, members of the Russian activist punk rock band Pussy Riot served jail terms after being convicted on the same grounds of violating the "blasphemy law" for staging an anti-Putin protest at a Moscow cathedral in 2012.

Since the release of Pokémon Go last July, the popular mobile game has been implicated in a string of bizarre investigations, including cases of robberies and traffic accidents, leading to widespread concerns of public safety in many countries across the world.