Six years ‘for Ukrainian borscht’: Russian cuisine historian Pavel Syutkin received a colony sentence in the case of ‘military fakes’

Formally, Pavel Syutkin, of course, was not imprisoned for borscht. On September 15, 2026, the Zyuzinsky District Court of Moscow sentenced the 61-year-old writer and historian of Russian cuisine to six years in a general regime colony on charges of spreading, according to Russian legislation, “knowingly false information” about the Russian army. He was also banned from administering websites and other internet resources for four more years. The prosecution requested eight years.

Author: Lev Varshavsky

But the phrase “six years for Ukrainian borscht” did not arise out of nowhere. It combines two stories of one person. For decades, Syutkin debunked beautiful myths about the “primordial Russian cuisine” and publicly stated that the modern Ukrainian tradition of borscht has its own history. After the start of the big war, the same person began writing about what was happening in Ukraine — and one of such publications led him to the dock.

His case also shows how far the mechanism of criminal prosecution for anti-war statements has spread in Russia. Now, for a long sentence, it is not at all necessary to be an opposition leader or an organizer of street protests. Sometimes a few paragraphs in Telegram are enough — even if before the war the public knew their author primarily for books about soups, pies, and the history of Soviet canteens. Human Rights Watch reports hundreds of criminal cases related to publications about the Russian army and speeches against the war.

Who is Pavel Syutkin and where is he known from

Pavel Syutkin was born in 1965 in Krasnodar, graduated from MGIMO, became a candidate of historical sciences, worked in the financial sector and in public service. Since the early 2010s, the history of food gradually became his main professional topic.

Together with his wife Olga Syutkina, he engaged in the study of Russian and Soviet gastronomy. It was not a collection of entertaining recipes “from grandmother’s chest.” The Syutkins worked with old cookbooks, pre-revolutionary editions, memoirs, Soviet press, trying to establish when a particular dish really appeared and where the document ends and the beautiful national legend begins.

They wrote “The Uninvented History of Russian Cuisine,” “The Uninvented History of Soviet Cuisine,” “The Uninvented History of Russian Products,” CCCP CookBook: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine, “Russian Cuisine: From Myth to Science,” and other books. RBC calls Syutkin the author of eight books, notes the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards he received, and his participation in Expo-2015 in Milan as an official representative of Russia.

Moreover, Syutkin’s fame was not limited to readers of historical research. He appeared on television and radio as an expert on the history of cuisine. He was invited to talk about the origin of products, Soviet gastronomy, and old recipes. For a significant part of the audience, he was precisely “that historian about food,” and not a political figure at all.

Pavel and Olga Syutkin also have a Telegram channel “Russian Cuisine: History” — @FoodHistory. Its archive contains old recipes, products, books, culinary traditions, the history of Soviet and pre-revolutionary food.

After February 2022, war began to appear more and more often alongside gastronomy there.

Thus, the culinary blog gradually became part of a criminal case.

What Syutkin wrote about Bucha

The reason for the prosecution was a publication that appeared on Telegram in April 2022. Syutkin wrote about strikes on Kyiv and the deaths of civilians in Bucha, comparing what was happening with events of World War II and recalling Babyn Yar.

The Russian accusation considered the published information to be knowingly false. The court found Syutkin guilty under paragraph “d” of part 2 of article 207.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation — dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of Russian armed forces, committed, according to the accusation, out of political hatred.

Syutkin himself did not plead guilty. In letters from prison, he called his case political and said that he was being punished “for words and an open anti-war position.” This is Syutkin’s position; the Russian court took the opposite legal assessment of his publication.

For the Israeli reader, there is a separate painful detail here. Syutkin himself referred to Babyn Yar — the site of the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis in occupied Kyiv. How appropriate the specific historical analogy is can be discussed separately. But the choice of image shows his usual way of thinking: the historian tried to view the present through already known testimonies of the past.

That is why for NAnews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency this is not only the story of one Russian criminal case. It is also a story about what happens when a dispute about testimonies and interpretations of the past ceases to remain a dispute among historians.

And what does Ukrainian borscht have to do with it

Here the story becomes almost grotesque.

Syutkin indeed publicly said things for years that did not fit well with the popular notion of borscht as an unquestionably “primordial Russian dish.” But he did not replace one national legend with another.

His position was more complex.

Ancient predecessors of borscht, the historian explained, appeared long before modern nation-states. The dish itself changed over centuries, there were different regional variants, and the old borscht could differ quite significantly from the familiar red soup today.

But when Syutkin was asked not about ancient etymology, but about the established national culinary tradition, the answer became much more definite.

In a 2018 interview, when asked to whom borscht belongs — Ukraine, Russia, or Poland — Syutkin replied: “No, it is still a Ukrainian dish”. He explained this primarily by the place of borscht in everyday Ukrainian culture and the vast number of its local varieties.

In 2020, when the Ukrainian application to UNESCO was discussed, Syutkin already provided a historical argument: in Russian culinary literature of the 19th century, borscht was primarily referred to as “Little Russian”, meaning it was associated specifically with the Ukrainian gastronomic tradition.

He admitted that Russia could theoretically try to present borscht as a joint Russian-Ukrainian heritage, but doubted that such a construction could be convincingly proven by historical sources.

This is a significant difference. Syutkin did not say that Russians did not and do not cook borscht. He distinguished between two things: the prevalence of the dish today and the history of the cultural tradition from which it grew.

Perhaps this is the best way to explain his professional approach.

He did not ask the dish for a passport. He asked the sources for a date.

Ukraine achieved recognition of borscht culture at UNESCO

On July 1, 2022, the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee included Culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking in the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. The consideration of the Ukrainian application was accelerated due to the full-scale war, displacement of people, and the threat to the preservation of the tradition itself.

The object of recognition was not a recipe with a mandatory amount of beets or cabbage, but a much broader cultural practice. UNESCO talks about regional varieties, family recipe transmission, joint preparation, holidays, customs, and the role of borscht as one of the markers of Ukrainian identity.

At the same time, the organization specifically made a reservation: borscht is cooked in other countries of the region as well, and the inclusion of the Ukrainian tradition in the list does not mean exclusive ownership of Ukraine over the dish itself. That is, the popular dispute “UNESCO decided whose borscht it is now” is formulated incorrectly. The international organization recognized specifically the Ukrainian culture of its preparation and the need for its protection.

For the Israeli reader, this dispute is not at all academic. Borscht arrived here long ago with immigrants from Ukraine and other countries of the former USSR, but in recent years it increasingly exists precisely as an element of modern Ukrainian culture in Israel.

NAnews has already told about the Israeli journalist and writer Igor Kulakov, a descendant of a tzadik, who dedicated a separate book to Ukrainian borscht — “My Book About Borscht”. For Kulakov, borscht is not just a recipe, but family memory, culture, and the history of Ukraine, which he now tells in Israel.

For NAnews readers, this story, by the way, is not new at all. We have already told about it when we wrote about Borshch Party in Jaffa — an evening of Ukrainian borscht in Israel, where the culture of this dish was already connected with the Ukrainian-Jewish and Israeli environment. In that material, we separately reminded about the UNESCO decision of 2022.

Later, Lev Varshavsky himself returned to the topic in the material “Evening of Ukrainian Cuisine in Ashkelon: Borscht Party and the Film ‘Taste of Freedom'”. There was already a completely lively Israeli story: a lecture on the history of borscht, a presentation of Igor Kulakov’s book “My Book About Borscht,” tasting, and Ukrainian cinema.

That is, for Israel, borscht has long ceased to be only a home memory of immigrants from the former USSR. Here it exists as a public Ukrainian cultural tradition — with books, lectures, festivals, evenings in Jaffa and Ashkelon.

And against this background, the words of the Russian historian Syutkin look especially interesting.

He called borscht Ukrainian and explained it with historical sources even before the UNESCO decision. And the international recognition of 2022 consolidated not the myth of “exclusive ownership of the soup,” but the existence of a separate Ukrainian cultural tradition, which Syutkin spoke about several years earlier.

And then the state came not for the history of food

At this point, the two lines of Syutkin’s biography converge.

When he argued with myths about Russian cuisine, the argument remained an argument. Syutkin could write a book, the opponent — a response article. One could open an old cookbook and find out where the name first appears, what the composition of the dish was, and what was called “Little Russian” in the 19th century.

After 2022, the rules changed.

Human Rights Watch reported in September 2025 about at least 641 people subjected to criminal prosecution since the start of the full-scale invasion on charges of spreading “false information” about the army or its “discreditation.” In total, according to the human rights organization, by that time, criminal cases for speeches against the war affected more than a thousand people.

Russian authorities justify such norms by the need to counteract knowingly false information about the armed forces. Human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, view many such cases as part of a broader system of suppressing peaceful criticism of the war.

And the case of Syutkin is especially indicative not because he is some extraordinarily influential opponent of the Kremlin.

Quite the opposite.

He did not lead a political party. He did not command a protest movement. He was not a professional military observer. The man wrote books about cuisine, went on television to talk about recipes, represented Russia at Expo, studied old culinary editions, and together with his wife ran a channel about the history of food.

And then he wrote a few paragraphs about the war.

Not long ago, state and major Russian TV channels themselves invited him to tell viewers why historical reality is often more complex than a beautiful legend. When it came to borscht, this thought could be discussed.

When it came to Bucha, the mechanism turned out to be different.

Closed trial. Criminal article. Six years in a colony.

Therefore, the headline “six years for Ukrainian borscht” is factually inaccurate. There is no charge in the criminal case for recognizing borscht as Ukrainian. Syutkin was convicted for publications about Russian military, which the court found to be knowingly false.

But borscht helps to understand who exactly was imprisoned.

A historian whose entire professional work was built around a simple habit: not accepting a beautiful and convenient version of the past just because it has been repeated for a very long time.

With borscht, this habit led him to old Russian cookbooks and the conclusion that the Ukrainian tradition has its own history.

With the war, it led him to a publication about Bucha.

For the first, he was argued with.

For the second, the Russian court gave him six years.