Links and consequences. How one city became a test lab for Russia’s “undesirable organisations” law, prosecuting educators over URLs

In the spring of 2025, an English teacher in Yaroslavl logged into VK, a widely used social network in Russia, and posted a message to her students: “9A and 9B [classes], good morning. Here’s your English homework for the week of April 16.” The message contained a hyperlink to britishcouncil.org, the website of the UK’s official cultural and language organisation, a fixture of English language teaching in Russia since 1992.

Ten months later, Anastasia Shadrova was a defendant in an administrative case. Under Article 20.33 of Russia’s Code of Administrative Offences, she was charged with “participation in the activities of an “undesirable” foreign organisation. 

The British Council had been added to the Russian “undesirable” registry in June 2025. Prosecutor General’s pointed statement described the UK organisation as one that “promotes the LGBT movement”, works to “free the populations of former Soviet republics from their Russian identity”, and “stimulates protest activity” while “educating Russian youth within the concept of Western dominance”.

The British Council had in fact left Russia in 2018 after the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the British town of Salisbury. Now, “britishcouncil.org” is on an official list, and Shadrova’s homework link was, prosecutors argued, distributing the organisation’s materials.

The Zavolzhsky district court dismissed the case. Judge Roman Mikhelson noted, surprisingly, what the police had failed to do: click the link. Investigators had screenshotted Shadrova’s VK page, “observed” the “britishcouncil.org” string, and treated that as sufficient. No one had examined the page the link led to, or had proven the destination materials actually belonged to the organisation. The court found that no offense had been committed and ended the proceeding.

Shadrova was unusually lucky. Others in Yaroslavl were not.

A city of undesirables

Yaroslavl is an ancient Russian city of just under 600,000 in the Volga region, not far from Moscow. It has universities, a theatre institute, language schools, a tourist trade. In the past months, its district courts processed an anomalously high number of cases under Article 20.33 against “undesirable organisations”. 

In October 2025, the Leninsky district court fined the language centre “Linguist” sixty thousand rubles (about $800) for an old British Council link on its website. The centre’s management told Mediazona that they had taken everything down as soon as they received notice, but the hearing went ahead anyway. 

The same month, the Krasnoperekopsky district court fined Alexander Novikov, head of IT at Yaroslavl State Technical University, twenty thousand rubles ($265) for a British Council link inside an academic collection hosted on the university site. 

In November, the Kirovsky district court fined Natalia Volokhovich, press secretary of the Yaroslavl Theatre Institute, the same amount, for a British Council link in an old curriculum PDF that, by the institute’s account, was no longer reachable through any working page on the public site at all, surviving only as a file in server storage. “Had representatives of the FSB or the Prosecutor’s Office attempted to access this page via the official website, they would never have been able to reach it. It remains unclear how the search was conducted,” defense attorney said in court. 

Two days later, the same court fined Alexander Dugin (no relation to the infamous theorist), head of the research and innovations directorate at Yaroslavl State University, twenty thousand rubles for Yale University materials in the university’s electronic library. Dugin pleaded not guilty. It made no difference. In December, the same court fined the head of information resources at Yaroslavl Pedagogical University twenty thousand rubles for an inspection that turned up links to the Carnegie Foundation, the British Council (as IELTS exam organiser), and Yale across four different sections of the institutional website—three undesirable organisations bundled into one ruling.

In April 2026, the Kirovsky court fined Lesya Kozyura, an English teacher at Yaroslavl School No. 70, five thousand rubles for a hyperlink on her personal social media page. The press release did not name the organisation. The pattern does not leave much to guess.

The “undesirable” universities

By now, Russian registry of “undesirable” organisations had absorbed an elite selection of Western higher education.

In 2023, the Prosecutor General’s office designated Vienna-based Central European University (CEU) for running educational programmes that “deliberately devalue and distort the history of the Russian state”, diminish the achievements of prominent Russian scientists and cultural figures, and recruit personnel for “a global anti-Russian media agenda saturated with hatred toward Russia and its multinational people”. In 2025, another Viennese entity, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), was added due to its ties to CEU, as well as hosting “pseudo-researchers” who call for “providing Kiev neo-Nazis with weapons, support criminal attacks on civilians, and advocate for increased military confrontation”. 

The most designated universities are from the United States. 

In July 2025, Yale University was designated as “undesirable” due to activity “aimed at violating the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation, the international blockade of the state and undermining its economic foundations, as well as destabilising the socio-economic and political situation in the country”.

What followed in the statement was even more peculiar, potentially revealing the true reason behind the targeting: the agency mentioned Yale World Fellows programme, a fellowship that, according to Russian prosecutors, “trains opposition leaders of foreign countries”; among the Russian graduates of the programme are late opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his aide Leonid Volkov. 

In March, Basmanny district court of Moscow fined an exiled writer and journalist Mikhail Zygar, already sentenced to 8.5 years in prison in absentia over “spreading fake news” about the Bucha killings, over his selection to the 2025 World Fellows programme.

In 2025–2026, Brigham Young University, Tufts Univeristy, UC Berkeley and Stanford University joined Yale on the list.