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The court has decided to transfer shaman Aleksandr Gabyshev to a general psychiatric hospital. This was reported by his lawyer, Aleksei Pryanishnikov.
The Primorsky Regional Court overturned the ruling of the Ussuriysk District Court on appeal, which in April had ordered that the shaman remain in a specialised type of hospital.
Gabyshev had been committed to compulsory treatment in a psychiatric institution with intensive supervision in July 2021. In February 2022, this was reduced to treatment in a specialised hospital. In December 2024, the Ussuriysk District Court in Primorsky Krai ordered that Gabyshev be transferred from a specialised facility to a general inpatient unit. However, in February 2025, the prosecutor’s office appealed this decision.
Gabyshev, who calls himself a shaman-warrior, spent several months in 2019 walking towards Moscow to “drive out Putin.” He was first detained in September 2019 in a night camp near a federal highway on the border with Irkutsk Region. That same year, a case was initiated against Gabyshev for public calls to extremist activity (Part 1 of Article 280 of the Russian Criminal Code). A psychiatric evaluation requested by the FSB in Yakutia declared Gabyshev to show signs of insanity. His defence maintains that the evaluation was improperly conducted.
In February 2021, Gabyshev faced another criminal case—this time under the article on use of violence against a representative of the authorities (Part 2 of Article 318 of the Criminal Code). The case stemmed from an injury to a National Guard officer sustained when police and a medic came to Gabyshev to take him to a psychiatric clinic. Investigators allege that the shaman wounded the officer with a homemade bladed weapon. In March that year, it was revealed that an expert analysis found no evidence of harm dangerous to the officer’s health, even though he is considered the victim in the case. Nevertheless, by July of the same year, Gabyshev was sent for compulsory treatment, where he has remained ever since, in psychiatric institutions.
5 August Shaman Aleksandr Gabyshev is not being transferred to a general psychiatric hospital, contrary to the court’s ruling. This was reported by his lawyer, Aleksei Pryanishnikov.
According to Gabyshev, speaking to his defence lawyer by phone, he is not being moved to less strict detention conditions because the psychiatric hospital in Yakutsk simply will not collect the patient from the hospital in Ussuriysk.
“They’re waiting for something, but no one’s explaining what for. The doctors have no idea why Yakutsk isn’t picking up the patients,” Pryanishnikov said.
20 August Aleksandr Gabyshev still remains in the special psychiatric hospital two months after the court’s decision to transfer him to a general hospital. This was reported by his lawyer, Aleksei Pryanishnikov.
According to him, lists of patients set for transfer arrived at the facility, but Gabyshev’s name was not on them.
“Now they promise [the transfer] in September. Overall, this is the recognisable style of the officials from Yakutia who are pursuing Aleksandr: they have to cause trouble, but make sure to do it in the stupidest possible way,” Pryanishnikov wrote.
Speaking to OVD-Info, he added that he links the failure to transfer the shaman to a general hospital with the “unwillingness of law enforcement in Yakutia to see Gabyshev in Yakutia.”
People can support Gabyshev by sending him a letter to the following address:
692548, Primorsky Krai, Ussuriysk (a city in the Russian Far East), village of Zarechnoye, 1a Pionerskaya Street, Regional Psychiatric Hospital No. 1
For Aleksandr Prokopyevich Gabyshev, born 1968