Автор: Yuliya Paramonova
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A Bird That Wouldn’t Migrate: How Ornithologist Sofia Rosenfeld Was Sentenced to Three and a Half Years in a Penal Colony for Two Donations
Sofia Rosenfeld has spent her life studying Arctic birds: traveling on expeditions to the Far North, following flocks of geese in a seaplane, and fighting to protect rare species. Now one of Russia’s leading ornithologists, a Doctor of Sciences in Biology, has been sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony —…
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An Expedition to Prison: Why Philosopher Nikolay Zyuzev Was Sentenced to Seven Years
The Supreme Court of the Komi Republic has sentenced philosopher Nikolay Zyuzev to seven years in a strict-regime penal colony on treason charges. Zyuzev, who holds both Russian and Canadian citizenship, is one of the best-known scholars of the legacy of the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. He left Russia after the war began, but in…
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Winter is coming. Why has the FSB reclassified research on the Russian North as working for foreign intelligence?
Doctor of Medical Sciences Alexey Dudarev spent 25 years as the lead author of regular monitoring reports on pollution in the Arctic originating from Russia. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, official participation by Russian scientists in the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) working group of the international Arctic Council was paused,…
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Walks with Leviathan. How Cautious Criticism of the Authorities Led Boris Kagarlitsky to Prison
Two years ago, on February 13, 2024, the Appellate Military Court toughened the sentence of publicist, sociologist, and political scientist Boris Kagarlitsky. The scholar, accused of “public calls for terrorism” (in a YouTube video discussing the explosion of the Crimean Bridge), had his previously imposed fine replaced with five years in a general-regime correctional colony.…
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Acing Drones 101: Enticing Top University Students to Join the New UAV Forces for Big Money
The Russian Ministry of Defense has started urging students at Russian universities to work as drone operators. But to do so, they must first sign a military service contract. Students are promised lump-sum payments of five million rubles and the option to terminate the contract after just one year. A T-invariant correspondent investigated whether the…
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A Talented Student on Treason Charges: How the FSB Uses Torture to Turn a Gifted Mathematician into a Dangerous Criminal
22-year-old mathematician Leonid Katz, a graduate of the “Intellectual” school for gifted children and holder of a bachelor’s degree from the Higher School of Economics, has been arrested on treason charges. For the previous two months he was subjected to so-called carousel arrests. Katz is accused of making donations to a charitable fund that assists…
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“Not an Enemy, but a Friend of the People”: The Trial of a Kurchatov Institute Employee
The Gatchina District Court has resumed hearings in the case of Dmitry Bogmut, a technician at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute named after B.P. Konstantinov (part of the Kurchatov Institute). After the onset of the war in Ukraine, Bogmut posted anti-war videos in a private thread on a forum with only a dozen users. He…