Treason‑lite. The FSB’s provocation playbook for turning Russians’ contacts with foreigners into criminal charges

Pavel Pishchulin of Penza had always been a restless character. By the time of his arrest in October 2022, aged 39, he had worked for the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) twice, become the subject of three criminal investigations, fathered four children, starred in a web series about a penal colony, and dabbled in local politics.

Pavel was never a prominent activist, nor did he hold any high office, but he became the first person in Russia to be arrested under the new Article 275.1 of the Criminal Code (“cooperation on a confidential basis with a foreign state”), which was introduced soon after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It is a lighter version of the treason law (Article 275), with significantly shorter sentences. But its vague wording can make it even easier to fall foul of. Among those accused of “confidential cooperation” are construction workers, entrepreneurs, journalists, lawyers, bank employees, and even Russian soldiers.

In the three years the law has been in effect, Russian courts have received 101 cases involving charges of confidential cooperation, and 82 people have already been convicted.

In Pishchulin’s case, a single drunken phone call to Ukraine that went unanswered, some careless correspondence, and a blatant provocation by the FSB, which was even noted in his court verdict, were enough to secure a conviction.

From the prison service to the list of terrorists and extremists

After graduating from a polytechnic university in 2005 with a degree in mechanical engineering, his mother Tatyana recalls, Pavel Pishchulin soon married and took a job with the Penza branch of the FSIN. There, he “worked with electronics, computers, and communications.” Later, hoping for a higher salary, he moved to the oil company Lukoil but was laid off. He then worked as a taxi driver and as an engineer repairing banking equipment. After another layoff, his mother says, Pavel struggled to find work for a long time and “became a bit disheartened, and family conflicts began”.

In 2019, Pavel returned to the FSIN system, this time working in Penal Colony No. 8, but again, according to Tatyana, “in communications.” He didn’t last long there either.

“He needed to have his rank reinstated, he had attended the military department at university, he’s a reserve artilleryman, an officer and an engineer,” his mother recalls. “The documents for his rank reinstatement were submitted, along with those for two or three other people. The department organised a picnic in the countryside to celebrate their promotions, as is common in the military. Afterwards, he got behind the wheel while intoxicated, was stopped by traffic police, and was fired for it”.

She is indignant: his colleagues didn’t stop her son from drunk driving and asked him not to tell the police he was coming from an FSIN picnic. They promised Pavel he wouldn’t be fired, but in the end, he was. Pishchulin went back to driving a taxi and later found a job as a press operator at the Spetsdetal factory, which produces parts for metal structures and pipelines.

Pishchulin’s socio-political activities began in 2019, the same year he was dismissed from the FSIN. He ran unsuccessfully for the Assembly of Representatives of the Penza district as a candidate for the Veterans’ Party. From February 2019, Pishchulin administered the VK page of the “All-Russian Social Unity” movement, where he published his eccentric manifestos and thoughts on a wide range of issues. For example, he proposed renaming the Russian Federation the Republic of Russia, introducing a state planning system, and reorienting the economy towards “natural physical indicators” (as well as withdrawing from the WTO and dissolving the Central Bank).

One Penza activist told Mediazona that no one really maintained contact with Pishchulin because he “would send all sorts of nonsense and invite people to some sect-like group”.

The former officer received his first conviction in 2020 for incitement to extremism, for which he was given a suspended sentence. The text of the verdict has not been published, but Pavel insists to a Mediazona correspondent that the prosecution was triggered by an economic manifesto published by an acquaintance of his from Belarus. According to Pishchulin, FSB officers forced him to claim authorship, threatening him with a real prison term. His second conviction, 180 hours of compulsory labour for insulting the feelings of religious believers, was handed down a year later. Pishchulin says that this time the case was “fabricated by officers from the Centre for Combating Extremism” because the activist “flatly refused to engage in money laundering under their protection”.

After his first conviction, Pishchulin was added to the register of extremists and terrorists maintained by Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial watchdog. He was removed from it on April 19, 2022. Three weeks earlier, on March 27, Pavel admits he had been drinking heavily. He recalls feeling distressed about the invasion of Ukraine, realising it would “drag on for a long time,” and worrying about his family. According to Pishchulin, the next morning he found that his browser history showed he had been searching for phone numbers for the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and his call history showed he had called them, but no one had answered. This marked the beginning of the third criminal case against him.

An FSB agent poses as a Ukrainian intelligence officer

These calls to Ukraine were flagged by officers at the Penza branch of the FSB. In April, Pishchulin received a call from a man who introduced himself as an SBU, Security Service of Ukraine, officer named Serhii Stakhiv. Pavel insists he immediately assumed the caller was an undercover FSB agent and “bombarded” him with political info to get him to back off. It worked; a couple of weeks later, the man calling himself Stakhiv blocked him. Pavel deleted the correspondence but kept the contact.

It is difficult to say what Pishchulin was corresponding with him about, or why, but when another person called him from a Ukrainian number on June 4, also introducing himself as an SBU officer, Pavel gave him his email address and began a correspondence.

This new contact was undoubtedly an officer from the Penza FSB department named Biryuzov, who was posing as a Ukrainian security agent as part of an undercover operation, a fact recorded in the court verdict.

Pishchulin now claims he suspected this, so he immediately told his correspondent about his contact with the supposed Stakhiv from the SBU to “test his reaction.” He even said that he had the call sign “Lis” (“Fox”) and the “SBU officer” was “Stakha.” “I continued a cautious correspondence to find out who this was and what they wanted. After the first incident, I was sure the local security services had left me alone,” Pishchulin explains.

They discussed a “swift counter-offensive” and a plan for “armed action in Penza”. Pishchulin mentioned he had previously sent photos of license plates near the Penza FSB building to Stakhiv.

In September, Pishchulin promised to send a “detailed plan to end the war in Ukraine” by “destroying Putin’s organised crime group”. After the agents stopped responding, he wrote on October 11: “Urgent message needed. We know how to destroy the current government in Russia”. The FSB had likely gathered sufficient material to open Russia’s first “confidential cooperation” case by that point.

Pishchulin was detained on October 17 and transferred to Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo detention centre. His mother did not know where he was for two months. Shortly before his arrest, Pishchulin had asked an acquaintance, Svyatoslav Yeremin, about joining the Wagner PMC; Yeremin confirmed this conversation to Mediazona.

After over a year in Lefortovo, Pishchulin’s trial began in February 2024, focusing on his correspondence with FSB officer Biryuzov. This communication was classified as an attempted crime, while his earlier chats with “Stakhiv” were excluded from the charges because they predated the new “confidential cooperation” law.

The court dismissed any claim of entrapment. It ruled the operation was not a provocation because the security services “already had information about his involvement in actions aimed at establishing and maintaining cooperative relations with officers of the Security Service of Ukraine”.

Pishchulin was ultimately sentenced to five years in prison. Blatant FSB provocations like this appear to be common in such cases.

FSB provocations

FSB provocations, sometimes barely concealed, are a key feature of “confidential cooperation” cases. For instance, a court sentenced Ivan Tolpygin to four years, claiming he had “proactively established contact” with the Ukrainian intelligence, yet the court’s own documents confirmed his correspondent was an FSB officer.

A more elaborate sting operation led to an eight-year prison sentence for Petr Opalnik, a Ukrainian-born construction worker who had recently received Russian citizenship. After his stepson received a mobilisation summons in the autumn of 2022, Opalnik suggested he may need to surrender if he ended up on the front line; he mentioned he had a nephew living in Poland.

Just three days later, the stepson visited Opalnik at his workplace equipped with covert video recording device, initiated a conversation about surrender and coaxed him into sharing the Polish phone number of his nephew as a potential contact for Ukrainian special services. He then sent the message “I want to live” to the number and received back what was noted in the verdict as a “pre-prepared and methodically formatted” set of instructions, likely a publicly available guide for soldiers wishing to surrender.

An FSB memo later claimed the Polish number was “used in the interests of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine”. Based on this, Opalnik was charged with both “confidential cooperation” and the rare crime of organising an attempt to voluntarily surrender. During his trial, he reported being tortured.

The stepson was later profiled on Ksenia Sobchak’s Telegram channel as having been unjustly mobilised while blind in one eye; he was subsequently seen living as a civilian and refused to speak with Mediazona. Even the mostly loyal newspaper Kommersant, reporting on Opalnik’s case, suggested he was a victim of a provocation: “It is possible that [the stepson] came to the attention of counter-intelligence officers, who then sent the soldier with recording equipment to his relative,” the article states. 

Lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov of the First Department human rights group believes over half of these cases follow a “well-rehearsed script” in which agents pose online as allies to entrap people who have expressed anti-war views.

The vagueness and the reality

Legally, the line between classic treason and “treason-lite” is blurred, with the choice of charge often left to the discretion of the security services. “I think there’s some internal debate going on there,” says lawyer Ivan Pavlov of First Department. 

In practice, the bar for prosecution is low. Simply establishing contact can be enough for a charge, even if no sensitive information is transmitted. One verdict explicitly stated that the law “only requires the establishment and maintenance” of contact and a citizen’s “consent to cooperate.” If information is shared, the FSB’s internal assessment of its sensitivity determines the charge; a photo of a tank might lead to a treason-lite charge, while the same photo with coordinates could result in a full treason case. Charges can also be upgraded after an initial conviction, as happened to one Crimean woman whose treason-lite sentence was overturned before she was retried for “classic” treason.

A case is typically built on two pillars: a classified FSB memo claiming the defendant’s foreign contact is linked to an intelligence agency, and a secret expert opinion on the sensitivity of any information shared. These documents are unchallengeable by the defense. “In effect, you can’t challenge such an expert opinion; we can’t commission an independent one,” explains lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov. “It’s a vicious circle.”

This reliance on classified materials means that court proceedings are secret and verdicts are almost never published, making the full scope of prosecutions difficult to assess. In the case of Dmitry Polunin, who was tried by the Krasnodar Krai Court, a court spokesperson refused to even confirm his name or sentence, citing the case’s classified nature; we still don’t know what he was prosecuted for. 

Even in the full texts of verdicts that are available for review, much is omitted. “The content of the documents is not detailed further in the verdict as it contains information constituting a state secret,” reads one such verdict in a “confidential cooperation” case.

While the law has been used against those accused of cooperating with a range of countries, including the UK, China, and Latvia, the majority of prosecutions are connected to Ukraine. The most common accusations involve communication with Ukrainian intelligence, bloggers, or paramilitary groups like the “Freedom of Russia Legion”, a unit of Russian citizens within the Ukrainian army. 

Treason-lite is often charged alongside participation in a terrorist organisation or the commission of a terrorist act or sabotage. In 2024, such charges featured in 21 of the 56 cases brought under Article 275.1. In the first eight months of 2025, 35 cases have already been filed in court (21 for “pure” confidential cooperation, 11 combined with participation in a terrorist organisation, and another three alongside a terrorist act or sabotage).

Yaroslav Kobzev, a 30-year-old construction worker from Lipetsk, was sentenced by a court to 9 years in prison under the same articles for “confidential cooperation” and preparing a terrorist act by a group. Kobzev says that in a work chat, he responded to an offer to earn some extra money from an unknown person. He was sent a photograph of a grey building with instructions to set it on fire.

“I was as if hypnotised; it was the first time in my life I’d felt like that!” Kobzev insists. “At some point, I don’t even remember what I wrote. I called an acquaintance, and he went to check where this warehouse was.” According to him, the acquaintance reported back that the area around the building was covered with cameras and that setting it on fire was a bad idea.

“The next day I woke up in a normal state of mind and wrote on my phone: ‘I AM NOT GOING TO DO ANYTHING, I WILL NOT COMMUNICATE WITH YOU ANYMORE,’” he insists. After his arrest, he says, his acquaintance “shifted all the blame” onto him, and the correspondence was found on Kobzev’s phone.

“Now, no one cares that I actually refused,” he laments. “I sent myself to prison for nothing. I worked in construction and earned a decent living; I had enough money. I had a very good life: a job, a home, my own flat, a girlfriend by my side. I got involved in something I should have never, ever touched”.

Risks for those who talk to journalists and human rights defenders abroad

The case of Nika Novak, a journalist from Chita, stands out sharply from the rest. She was sentenced to 4 years for “confidential cooperation” with the editorial team of Siberia.Realities, a regional project of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, for which Novak had been writing since 2022. The court ruled that Novak had “criminally earned” half a million roubles through her journalism and ordered the confiscation of the money.

The investigation claimed that Novak was engaged in “the biased coverage of processes and phenomena in the socio-political sphere of the Russian Federation”.

Nika Novak’s case is, so far, the only known instance of a journalist being prosecuted under the treason-lite law for working with editorial teams based outside Russia.

In May, Maria Bonzler, a lawyer in Kaliningrad who had participated in many high-profile criminal cases in the region, was arrested. She became the first human rights defender to be charged with “confidential cooperation”.

According to the investigation, she “transmitted information about employees of the region’s security services, which became known to her through her legal activities, to the special services of an unfriendly state”.

The details of the charges are not yet known, but searches related to Bonzler’s case were also conducted at the homes of two other lawyers who, like her, had represented the Kaliningrad resident Igor Baryshnikov in court. This suggests that the charges may be linked to this high-profile case. Baryshnikov, who is seriously ill, was sentenced to 7.5 years for Facebook posts about the Russian bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, the killings in Bucha, and the sinking of the cruiser Moskva. The 64-year-old moves with a tube, a cystostomy, in his abdomen and requires constant medical supervision.

A week before Maria Bonzler’s arrest, the European Union updated its sanctions list to include 28 persons—judges, prosecutors, and investigators “involved in fabricating cases against various activists.” The list also included Olga Balandina, the judge from the Sovetsky city court who handed down Baryshnikov’s sentence.

As with classic treason, the application of Article 275.1 is clearly gaining momentum in Russia. While 56 treason-lite cases were brought to court in the whole of 2024, 35 have already been filed in the first seven months of 2025 alone.

The wording of the treason-lite law criminalises not only “confidential cooperation” with a foreign state but also with an “international or foreign organisation.” This poses risks not just for careless activists caught in an FSB provocation or naive people who call foreign embassies, but also for those who constantly irritate the authorities with their work and maintain contact with foreign or exiled colleagues: journalists and human rights defenders.

With Mediazona data department.

Editor: Egor Skovoroda