76 criminal cases and counting. Widespread crackdown over donations to Navalny’s Anti‑Corruption Foundation targets regular supporters. A Mediazona investigation

In the summer of 2024, police arrived at the home of a programmer we will call Alexander Basov. They presented a warrant to search his apartment, stating that security services had information he had transferred money to the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF), the main organisation founded by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny that continues to serve as a hub of opposition activity after his death.

“They didn’t seem very competent, to be honest,” Basov recalls. “I managed to get all my documents, phones, and laptops out of the house”.

After the search, police took him for questioning and demanded he confess to “financing extremism”. “They told me, ‘Look, this is a federal programme. We were given a directive to round up everyone who sponsored the ACF’,” Basov says. “They had a quota, and they were just filling it.”

Basov was told to return with a lawyer to give a “proper confession”. Instead, after checking his bank statements and discovering he had indeed made small donations to the ACF after it was outlawed, he fled Russia.

His case is far from unique. Exactly four years earlier, a Moscow court branded the ACF and its affiliates “extremist organisations”, and now Russian authorities are pursuing a coordinated, nationwide crackdown against its financial supporters. A Mediazona investigation has identified at least 76 criminal cases across 38 regions, with the number of prosecutions accelerating dramatically. The first six months of 2025 saw more cases reach the courts than in the previous three years combined.

The Dragnet

Despite Navalny and his allies constantly being harassed and persecuted before, supporting ACF activities had not been criminal until August 2021, when it was officially outlawed. The prosecutions target anyone who donated to the ACF from a Russian bank card since that moment to March 2022, when Visa and MasterCard suspended their operations in the country due to the war in Ukraine. 

On August 5, 2021, a day after the court ruling took effect after an unsuccessful appeal, Navalny’s team launched what they assured supporters was a new, secure way to donate through Stripe, a US-based online payment processor. The idea was that by properly setting up billing via a foreign intermediary unwilling to respond to data requests from Moscow, the final recipient of the funds would be masked from the Russian financial system.

On that first day, a critical error occurred. The payment description that appeared on some donors’ bank statements contained a truncated version of the ACF’s website address, referencing its Russian abbreviation, FBK: WORLD.FBK.IN. Stripe platform’s interface suggests this was likely due to a setup error; a field for a business’s website intended for internal verification appears to have been automatically used to generate the public payment descriptor seen by banks. This simple mistake gave the authorities their initial lead.

While Navalny’s team claimed the error was fixed, the security services had already found a more durable method for identifying donors. They discovered that every transaction, regardless of the public-facing description, carried a unique merchant ID: V2NI29SJROMGYKY. This identifier, which Russian court documents claim is linked to an account at the American bank Wells Fargo, was visible to the Russian banks processing the payments. The data was then collected by Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial watchdog with access to all bank transactions, and passed to the FSB and Interior Ministry to pursue prosecutions.

Knowing this ID, authorities could request data from banks for all transactions sent to that specific identifier. This string of letters and numbers is now the central piece of evidence in dozens of criminal cases, allowing the state to link individuals directly to the banned organisation. To solidify their case in court, prosecutors present testimony from banking experts who claim that a merchant ID is unique to a single recipient; Mediazona found that these expert statements are often copied nearly word-for-word across different criminal cases in different regions.

In the court documents studied for the investigation, the process works as follows: authorities, having obtained a list of names linked to the merchant ID, build a case against each one. To prove criminal intent, investigators gather supplementary evidence of a defendant’s political views, such as prior donations to the ACF before the ban, social media activity, or even private correspondence about politics. This is used to argue the person “could not have been unaware” that they were funding an extremist group.

Mediazona’s own research into donations made via Stripe proved that a single organization could have different merchant IDs associated with it at different times. Stripe did not respond to our requests for comment, and without access to its internal systems, it is impossible to definitively verify the prosecution’s core technical assertion.

ACF declined to respond to questions submitted by Mediazona toward the end of this investigation. For the full description of our methods, please refer to the Russian original.

The Targets

The targets of this campaign are not just high-profile activists but ordinary people from all walks of life. Among them are the journalist Andrei Zayakin, the cardiologist Ivan Tishchenko, and a mother of multiple children, Lyudmila Gonchar, alongside mechanics and shop owners. Many, like Basov, had forgotten they had even made the small donations years earlier.

In a few cases, defendants have insisted they never knowingly made the donations after the ban, suggesting that previous recurring payment subscriptions may have been automatically transferred to the new system or that their card details were used without their knowledge.

The judicial outcomes reveal a geographical divide. Outside of the capital, courts typically issue hefty fines, usually between 100,000 and 600,000 roubles ($1,200–7,500 today). In Moscow, the system is far more punitive: courts have almost always handed down prison sentences, typically of three to four years. In one case, a former municipal deputy, Anton Grishin, was initially fined 350,000 roubles (~$4,400 at the current rate), but prosecutors appealed the sentence, and a Moscow court resentenced him to 3.5 years in a penal colony.

The crackdown has now shifted the focus of Russia’s anti-extremism laws. Whereas Article 282.3 of the criminal code was previously used mainly against religious groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the vaguely-defined youth gang-culture movement “A.U.E.”, it is now primarily deployed against the ACF’s supporters.

With a 10-year statute of limitations on financing extremism, the tens of thousands of people who made donations during that seven-month window remain at risk.

Author: Olga Romashova

Data: Olga Romashova, Mediazona Data Department

Infographics: Mediazona Data Department

Editors: Maxim Litavrin, Egor Skovoroda