Russia turns on its scientists. Donations to Alexei Navalny’s foundation are landing researchers in prison

“Do you understand the sentence?” Judge Dzhemal Kurbanov asks Sofya Rosenfeld, a doctor of biological sciences and a specialist in Arctic birds.

“No,” the scientist replies, bewildered, and asks him to repeat it. “You were speaking very fast.”

“What exactly? You don’t understand what the punishment is? Three years and six months’ imprisonment in a general-regime penal colony! You may appeal within 15 days of the sentence being handed down. You may appeal within 15 days of receiving a copy of the verdict. Anything else?”

“That’s all.”

On October 7, Rosenfeld, a researcher at the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was taken into custody in the courtroom. She is being sent to a penal colony for two transfers of 1,000 roubles, or about $12 at the current rate, each to FBK accounts. She is the second woman in Russia to receive a custodial sentence for donating to Alexei Navalny’s organisation.

“My work is here, the birds are here, everything is here”. Why Sofya Rosenfeld didn’t leave Russia

Armed men burst into Rosenfeld’s Moscow flat at half past four in the morning on December 5, 2025, according to her friend, biologist Arthur Ryabitsev. The two had returned late the previous evening from a trip to Israel, and he had stayed the night at her apartment. “They didn’t force anyone onto the floor, but they terrified everyone: us, the neighbours,” Ryabitsev recalls. “They carried out a search. They weren’t really looking for anything in particular, but they asked Sofya to show them where her phone and laptops were, and took everything.”

After the search, both were driven to the Moscow headquarters of the Investigative Committee for questioning. Rosenfeld was given a state-appointed lawyer, whom she soon dismissed; Ryabintsev says she described him as “completely off”. “Whenever the investigators asked her something, the lawyer would just say, ‘Agree,’ and nothing else. Well, Sonya is a clever person, and she quickly realised they were trying to talk her into admitting to everything they could.”

Ryabitsev was questioned too. “What my relationship with her is, what I do, how I’d describe her, what I think about her transfers [to FBK],” he lists, adding that investigators were also interested in the biologist’s attitude to the war in Ukraine. “I said that we support the state we live and work in.”

When discussing the charges against Rosenfeld, investigators stressed, according to Ryabitsev, that FBK had been designated an “extremist organisation” in June 2021 and that a notice to that effect “was in the newspaper”.

“I said I don’t read newspapers, none of us read newspapers,” the scientist explains. “The ruling came into force at the beginning of August, but at that time we were on a field trip in the Far North. [Rosenfeld] couldn’t have cancelled those automatic payments while we were in the field anyway. We were busy with science and filming!”

The defence argued that Rosenfeld had not cancelled her recurring payments because she was on an expedition. However, even before the court designated FBK “extremist”, the foundation itself had stopped accepting donations, and in August 2021 it launched a new donation system via the payment service Stripe, which was supposed to conceal who was receiving the money.

On the very first day, a bug caused a fragment of the address WORLD.FBK.IN to appear on users’ bank statements. Navalny’s team quickly fixed the flaw, but banks retained the internal transaction metadata. By studying the first exposed transfers, the security services identified FBK’s merchant ID and began requesting bank records in bulk using that code to identify donors.

On the day of the search and interrogation, December 5, Rosenfeld was released on a written travel restriction. A month later she was summoned to the Investigative Committee again, and on February 17, 2026, she was added to the list of “terrorists and extremists” maintained by Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial intelligence agency, which froze her bank accounts.

She continued to work at the institute: its management suggested she carry on “as normal”—at least until the verdict. Some colleagues “even came round and offered advice”, Ryabitsev says.

“The first piece of advice was to leave Russia,” he says. “But she was against it: ‘No, I live here, I work here, everything I have is here. What would I do outside Russia?’ ”

Rosenfeld is one of Russia’s leading ornithologists and a specialist in Arctic waterfowl. She holds dual Russian and Israeli citizenship, but she always wanted to work in Russia specifically.

“She used to say: ‘My work is here, the birds are here, everything is here,’ ” says another colleague, who asked not to be named. “Of course, she had lots of international projects too: she did [bird] counts in Alaska, at wintering grounds in Greece, in Bulgaria, France, Kazakhstan, South-East Asia and China. But her main place of work is our Russian Arctic, and if she had left, that would have closed it off to her for ever. She wanted to do science in Russia, and she did a great deal.”

The scientist opposed a bill that effectively legalised the shooting of animals listed in Russia’s Red Book of endangered species, and for more than 15 years she campaigned for a ban on spring hunting of waterfowl, publicly criticising the hunting lobby.

“The key problem is a group of people, mostly MPs and oligarchs, who want to make it possible to shoot animals anywhere, without legal restrictions,” Rosenfeld told the outlet Takie Dela in 2024. “They push laws through the Ministry of Natural Resources, and many of them get passed, while scientists’ conservation recommendations are ignored.”

“The hunting lobby means big people, big bosses,” says Ryabitsev. “Including security officials who like shooting animals from helicopters.”

Rosenfeld had opponents not only among officials but also in academia—some were irritated by her civic activism and her uncompromising views.

“Of course, she is incredibly determined, she would throw herself into a fight furiously and might say something sharp. Some people disliked her for going too far, for speaking out too harshly,” says the other colleague.

“We thought: it should all go fine, then”. Hopes for the trial

Rosenfeld’s trial began at Moscow’s Gagarinsky District Court in July.

Friends and colleagues came to support her. In the court halls they discussed scientific papers and upcoming expeditions, but when the conversation turned to the case, they asked her lawyers rather naive questions.

In court, the biologist did not deny making the transfers, but she denied supporting extremism.

“I find it deeply—how should I put it—repugnant when people kill animals, even legally, simply as part of hunting, let alone people. So there can be no question whatsoever of my sharing extremist views, and accordingly I do not admit any criminal intent,” she said. “When I decided to start supporting FBK, I was guided solely by the fight against corruption. Even in my own work…” Rosenfeld began, trying to explain her motives.

“What, don’t we have law enforcement agencies for that?” Judge Kurbanov interrupted.

“I believe… I believed that any help from the public would be needed here. Because even in my own work, connected with scientific research and conservation, I saw what monstrous forms this evil can take. And at the time it seemed to me that any help in the fight against corruption would be a good thing.”

In September, as the trial was drawing to a close, the court allowed Rosenfeld to travel to Yamal, the Arctic peninsula in North-Western Siberia where scientists have for several years been counting and tagging musk oxen. This came as a surprise to her friends and to the scientist herself: because of her travel restriction, she had been unable to take part in expeditions since the previous December. According to Ryabitsev, this had made Rosenfeld irritable and she had been “grieving terribly”.

“They let her go without any problems at all. We thought at the time: it should all go fine in court, then,” he admits.

Although the prosecutor had asked for five years in a penal colony, those close to the ornithologist believed the court would give her a fine or a sentence of forced labour—a punishment in which convicts work at an assigned enterprise and part of their wages is deducted by the state. On the day of the verdict, no prison escort was to be seen in the corridor or in the small courtroom. The officers came in only once the judge was already reading out the sentence—swallowing his words so badly that the defendant did not immediately realise she was facing real prison time.

Rosenfeld was handcuffed and heard the rest of the sentence from behind the bars of the glass courtroom cage, known as the “aquarium”. The escort officers flatly refused to accept a bag of essentials her friend had packed for the pre-trial detention centre—a toothbrush, underwear and a couple of T-shirts.

“You could always take things before,” her lawyer protested, to no avail.

A conveyor belt of cases against scientists. Counter-extremism police and the FSB’s Fourth Service

Rosenfeld is not the only Russian scientist to be prosecuted over donations to FBK. In spring 2026, Mediazona noticed that cases of “financing extremism” against employees of the Russian Academy of Sciences were arriving at Moscow courts one after another. We counted at least six.

“At six in the morning I couldn’t work out what was going on—drunks, or a courier, something like that. My wife went to the door first,” one of the scientists told Mediazona. “I got dressed and went over. Then people in balaclavas came in. My first thought was that they were bandits. They grabbed me by the arms. Well, I tried to break free, of course, but it was no use. And then the handcuffs [went on]. Properly, mind you. I mean, they didn’t cause me any physical pain, they didn’t shove my face into the floor. They just made me kneel. And they took me to the kitchen and showed me the warrant. That’s when I realised they weren’t bandits, it was our own dear authorities. Thank God, a serious crime. And thank God, they won’t torture me or kill me.”

The Rosenfeld case file contains testimony from a witness, Fyodor Klapov, an officer with Moscow’s Centre E, the Interior Ministry’s counter-extremism unit, notorious for harassing and persecuting opposition activists. He said that in September 2025 he had “received verification material” on Rosenfeld from the 4th Department of Directorate “P” of the FSB’s Fourth Service. The document stated that the scientist was “possibly involved in financing FBK”.

The same FSB unit appears in other donation cases. A year ago, a court in Dubna, a science town north of Moscow that is home to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, fined physicist Dmitry Kazakov 300,000 roubles (about $3,600) for two transfers of 500 roubles ($6) each to FBK. According to the verdict, the security services turned their attention to the scientist after a letter classified “secret” from “the 4th Service of the UZKS of the FSB”, which—as later in the Rosenfeld material—referred to Kazakov’s “possible involvement” in financing the foundation.

It is not entirely clear which service was meant in Kazakov’s case: the abbreviation UZKS points to the FSB’s Second Service (the Directorate for the Protection of the Constitutional System), whereas the Fourth Service, also known as the SEB, handles “economic security”.

However, Mediazona has established that the 4th Department of Directorate “P” of the FSB’s Fourth Service initiated at least two further criminal cases for “financing extremism” against scientists over the past year.

According to the investigative centre Dossier, officers of Directorate “P” oversee Rostec (the state defence and industrial conglomerate), Rusnano, Roscosmos, oil and gas companies, major defence plants, nuclear power stations and gold-mining companies. It is reasonable to assume that the list of sectors under their “supervision” has recently grown.

“The Centre E officer told [me] that [the Fourth Service] handles Skoltech and the Higher School of Economics,” one of the scientists against whom the FSB’s Fourth Service had also initiated a case over FBK donations told Mediazona on condition of anonymity.

And indeed, besides researchers at Academy of Sciences institutes, similar cases have been opened in Moscow against other scientists and lecturers. Mediazona has learnt that they include at least three specialists from Skoltech, the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, and the same number of employees of Rostec subsidiaries. We also know of at least two cases against lecturers at the Higher School of Economics (HSE), one of Russia’s top universities.

Among them is 38-year-old mathematician Andrei Dymov, an associate professor at HSE and a senior researcher at the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the RAS. In May 2026, Moscow’s Zyuzinsky District Court sentenced him to three and a half years in a general-regime penal colony. Together with Rosenfeld, he is one of two scientists to have received custodial sentences for donating to FBK.

Dymov signed up for donations on August 5, 2021, and sent FBK a total of 3,500 roubles, or $43. He pleaded guilty.

The scientist worked at HSE for ten years and was named among the university’s best lecturers three times: in 2022, 2024 and 2025.

“They took him away a month ago, for show,” an anonymous source told the outlet T-Invariant after the verdict. “Masked men broke down the door of his apartment. Then they let him go for a while [on a travel restriction], and today came the sentence.”

When considering his appeal, the court agreed to admit a petition from HSE asking for Dymov’s sentence to be changed to a non-custodial one.

“His absence even for two years will be a significant brake on the development of the subjects HSE is working on,” the petition said.

Despite this, in August the Moscow City Court upheld the mathematician’s prison sentence. Dymov’s staff page on the university website is now unavailable.

The other Academy of Sciences and Skoltech employees accused of financing extremism were given fines or forced labour.

Several more engineers and researchers have been given fines or forced labour by Moscow courts. Mediazona reporters attended the hearings, but the defendants asked not to be named, a request we grant considering the circumstances.

They include a Skoltech employee whom the Savyolovsky District Court fined 500,000 roubles ($6,000) in September for a 300-rouble ($3.60) donation, and a former employee of Proryv, a Rosatom subsidiary, whom the Gagarinsky court sentenced to a month and a half of forced labour; he was subsequently dismissed “by mutual agreement”.

At the same Gagarinsky court, the trial of a researcher at the RAS Institute of Biomedical Problems is now under way. At the same time, Moscow is hearing a case against a researcher at another Academy of Sciences institute, prompted by three donations of 1,100 roubles ($13.30) each made in 2021 and 2022.

In September, the Moscow police department placed a junior researcher at Skoltech on its wanted list; he is also accused of donating to FBK. His case reached the Savyolovsky District Court at the end of May. A preliminary hearing was due to be held at the end of June, but the defendant did not appear.

“We work so as not to end up in prison”. The mood in the scientific community

Why scientists and university lecturers have increasingly become defendants in “financing extremism” cases over the past year remains an open question.

In conversations with Mediazona, one of the accused recalled that officers had openly referred to scientists in his presence as a “big category”.

“They said: ‘There are a lot of your lot’,” he recalled the officers saying. “They said ‘universities’, but they meant the Academy of Sciences and so on.”

At the same time, several anonymous sources in academia told Mediazona that they were not aware of any centralised or special checks at the Academy of Sciences or universities relating to possible FBK donations.

“We haven’t had a wave of checks,” says an employee of one of the Academy’s regional research centres. “There are periodic inspections, but they existed before 2022 too. They mainly look at maps and other formally restricted information. Very detailed maps are considered classified, something useful to the enemy. But that seems outdated to me, given all the modern online services. Still, some colleagues use them to look at terrain.”

Exactly how the security services are identifying people who donated to FBK is still not entirely clear. One of the accused, for instance, remembered an officer telling her that the campaign had started with “leaked Smart Voting lists”—a reference to Navalny’s tactical voting scheme, whose sign-up databases have been leaked online.

In available leaks of databases of Navalny supporters, Mediazona found the names of 12 scientists who have become defendants in criminal cases since late 2025 (two others were not on these lists).

“I think there are lists of those who donated,” says another scientist, who asked not to be named. “It’s worth making absolutely sure you definitely didn’t do it. Before the search I’d heard that a wave of these cases had begun, so I checked my email and found nothing. You need to look at your bank transactions, and very carefully: they’re barely labelled at all, but it’s definitely worth your time.”

Those who donated to FBK have become for the security services “an almost bottomless source of the simplest cases, where the courts don’t bother establishing intent or awareness”, he argues.

“I think the increase in prosecutions of scientists is more likely a consequence of the fact that, statistically, there were more people from science and education among donors than average. But I don’t have enough data to test that hypothesis,” he tells Mediazona.

The scientist concludes that for former FBK donors, the only safe way out now is to leave Russia.

“Everyone who made transfers should assume that they will come for them too. It’s important to understand that all conversations may be listened in on. You have to assume that all bank accounts and property transactions will be frozen. All phones, computers and storage devices will be seized and examined. During a search they will look for extremist literature and symbols,” agrees another defendant in a “financing extremism” case, who also asked not to be named.

Researchers often guess their colleagues’ political views but prefer not to discuss them. As one biologist who asked not to be named points out, in this respect the scientific community is like any workplace where people hold different positions. Nevertheless, according to Mediazona’s sources, an oppressive atmosphere of self-censorship has now settled over the scientific world.

“At conferences, colleagues from Russia sometimes joke that we work so as to at least not end up in prison—but how much of that is a joke and how much is truth, you can’t tell,” says a former researcher at ITMO University in St Petersburg.

Despite the fear, the sympathies of the scientific community often lie with the persecuted. One Academy of Sciences employee convicted of “financing extremism” told Mediazona that his managers did not demand that he resign, knowing him to be “a decent person”.

“On a human level, they supported me,” he says.

Colleagues come to many scientists’ hearings to show support. The management of institutes and universities is also in no hurry to dismiss staff facing prosecution. Andrei Dymov remained on HSE’s staff right up until the appeal court upheld his prison sentence.

Many of the current defendants and convicts are leading specialists in their fields, as their colleagues openly state in court. Rosenfeld’s contribution to science, for instance, was praised by one of Russia’s leading physicists, Mikhail Danilov: “She is extraordinarily important to this work. Without her, it will all simply grind to a halt.”

Editors: Anna Pavlova, Dmitry Tkachev