Paul Goble
Staunton, April 11 – Before Putin launched his expanded invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, treason charges and convictions in the Russian Federation were relatively rate, Yevgeny Smirnov of the judicial rights group First Department says; but since then more than 700 Russians have been convicted, most as the result of provocations by the security services.
“Russian intelligence officers incite people to commit acts for which the latter are subsequently imprisoned,” he says; and these officers, especially outside the major cities, don’t even hide that this is what they are doing (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/04/11/bolshinstvo-del-po-gosizmene-seichas-eto-rezultat-provokatsii).
In fact, Smirnov says, outside of Moscow or St. Petersburg where intelligence officers are more sophisticated and careful, those working with fields “actually document within the case files that cases brought to court were in fact preceded by what they refer to as ‘an operational experiment.’”
“During the course of surveillance,” he continues, the case file says that an intelligence officer “showed an inclination to support a hostile ideology” and that led the intelligence agency to “conduct an operational experiment during which the person in question agreed to carry out a task directed against the security of the Russian Federation.”
Just how this works, Smirnov says, is shown by the case of Ivan Tolpygin, an Oryol resident convicted of treason in 2024 and sentenced to four years in the camps. The entire case was “based on the claim that Tolpygin had ‘established and maintained contact” with an unnamed ‘representative of Ukraine.’
In fact, Smirnov says, “no such ‘representative of Ukraine’ existed,” and the court verdict even specifies that Tolpygin was “corresponding with a certain intelligence officer who was ‘acting within the framework of an investigative operation, that is, ‘an operational experiment,’ being carried out by officers of the FSB.”
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