Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) Fourth Service has been involved in initiating criminal cases against scientists and university lecturers over donations to the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). According to an investigation by Mediazona, officers from one of the service's departments initiated at least three such cases over the past year.
The investigation identifies the Fourth Department of Directorate P within the FSB's Fourth Service, which deals with economic security.
One of the defendants was ornithologist Sofia Rozenfeld, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution. On October 7, Moscow's Gagarinsky District Court sentenced her to three years and six months in a general-regime penal colony over two donations of 1,000 rubles each to FBK.
According to court documents reviewed by the journalists, Fyodor Klapov, an officer with Moscow's Center for Combating Extremism, testified that he had received materials concerning Rozenfeld from the FSB department. In August 2025, an operative from the Fourth Service filed a report identifying indications of a criminal offense.
Mediazona found that more than ten cases involving donations to FBK by scientific researchers had reached Moscow courts over the preceding six months. Defendants included employees of Russian Academy of Sciences institutes, Skoltech, organizations associated with Rosatom, and lecturers at the Higher School of Economics.
In May 2026, Andrei Dymov, a lecturer at the Higher School of Economics and researcher at the Steklov Mathematical Institute, was also sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
However, not every case against a researcher can be confidently linked to the FSB's Fourth Service. Documents in the case of physicist Dmitry Kazakov, for example, contain an ambiguous designation of the security service unit involved.
FBK, founded by opposition politician Alexei Navalny, was designated an "extremist organization" by a Russian court in 2021. Donations to the foundation subsequently became grounds for prosecution under legislation criminalizing the financing of extremist activity.
Mediazona's investigation shows how this practice has spread into research institutions and universities. However, the established involvement of an FSB unit in several cases does not mean that the same unit initiated every such prosecution.