A St. Petersburg court has sentenced an Orthodox blogger and veteran of the war in Ukraine to 15 years in a high-security prison after finding him guilty of raping a minor, the city’s court press service reported on Monday.
According to investigators, Klaud Rommel repeatedly raped his then girlfriend’s daughter between September 2022 and February 2024. After he was first detained on 30 September 2024, Rommel denied the charges against him and claimed only to have given the girl a medical massage.
“He tutored the child for school. When the couple split up, they carried on living together. Furthermore, the accused moved the child into his room,” state-affiliated business daily Kommersant reported in 2024. Local news website Fontanka wrote in March that Rommel had molested the girl and asked her to masturbate him when she was eight years old.
The victim’s godmother reportedly contacted the police when she became aware of the abuse, prompting Rommel to enlist to fight in Ukraine once law enforcement began conducting its inquiries. However, Rommel was returned home after being wounded and was remanded in custody after prosecutors challenged the court’s original decision to allow him to remain at liberty until a verdict was reached. His trial was held behind closed doors.
During his deployment to Ukraine, Rommel, a Russian Orthodox vlogger whose YouTube channel has around 7,000 subscribers, made videos on the front line, in one case filming straight after an attack in which he almost lost a leg.
Rommel’s ex-wife told Kommersant that his real name is Alexander, which he changed after a suicide attempt in 2014, when he was reborn as “successful family man Klaud Rommel”. He also severed ties with his parents at the time, as he considered them “Alexander’s parents, not Klaud’s”.
