A Baptist believer from Barabinsk, Novosibirsk oblast, Russia, father of five children, railway depot driver.
In 2022, he went out on solo pickets against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and made anti-war social media posts. On 24 February 2022, he went to the first anti-war picket with a home-made poster “Putin is crazy, alas. And you?» His anti-war protest activities were punished with three administrative fines, in total 45,000 Russian rubles (about 560 Euros). The religious activist was also subjected to attempts of job dismissal.
Earlier, Oshchepkov was expelled from the Baptist church in the city of Barabinsk for political reasons. The initiator of the expulsion was pastor Ivan Kharchenko, presumably the brother of Leonid Kharchenko — one of the three persons sentenced to life imprisonment by the district court of The Hague in the case of shooting down a Malaysian Boeing from the territory of the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic in 2014.
