Russian Court Imposes 12-Year Prison Term for Online Harassment That Prompted Teen’s Suicide Attempt

A Novgorod District Court handed 21-year-old Mikhail Shalimov a 12-year prison term for a campaign of online abuse that drove a 16-year-old schoolgirl from Ufa to attempt suicide. Shalimov first met Diana in a VK community devoted to Minecraft, then escalated the interaction into months of harassment, gathering her address, phone number, school and relatives’ details from public sources. He repeatedly threatened her, fabricated bomb threats using her identity, created a channel showing animal cruelty, and called her parents at work, posing as her father to file a false murder report.

He explicitly told her to kill herself, promising to end the abuse only if she did, which led to her suicide attempt. The court found him guilty of inducing a minor to attempt suicide (Article 110 Part 2) and of filing knowingly false terrorist reports (Article 207 Part 2). This judgment adds to a string of convictions in Russia tied to “death groups” such as the Blue Whale case, where sentences have grown increasingly severe since 2017.