Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
The donations were made just after the foundation was ruled “extremist” — five years ago.
For years, Sofya Rozenfeld tracked geese and swans across Russia’s Arctic tundra from an ultralight seaplane.
The 50-year-old senior researcher at the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences is one of the country’s leading specialists on migratory waterfowl, with international projects stretching from Alaska and Greece to Bulgaria, France, Kazakhstan and China.
On October 7, a Moscow court sentenced her to three and a half years in a penal colony for two donations of 1,000 rubles each, roughly $25 in total, to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, known by its Russian initials FBK.
The donations were made in August and September 2021, just around the time Russian authorities designated the foundation an “extremist” organization. The Moscow City Court officially designated FBK extremist in June, and the ruling went into legal effect in August the same year.
The prosecutor at the Gagarinsky District Court of Moscow had asked for five years; the judge convicted her under Part 1 of Article 282.3 of the criminal code, which bars financing an “extremist” group, according to OVD-Info.
A scientist who refused to leave
Rozenfeld, who holds dual Russian and Israeli citizenship, had her Moscow apartment searched by armed men in a predawn raid on December 5, 2025, independent outlet Mediazona reported. Her phones and laptops were seized and she was taken to the Investigative Committee for questioning, then released the same day on a written travel restriction. On February 17, 2026, she was added to Russia’s registry of “terrorists and extremists,” which froze her bank accounts.
Colleagues had urged her to leave Russia. She refused.
“My work is here, the birds are here, everything is here,” she told them, Mediazona reported.
In court, she said she had donated to support the foundation’s anti-corruption work, not to fund extremism. “I believe that any public help here will be necessary,” she said, according to OVD-Info.
Part of a wider crackdown
Prosecutions in Russia over donations to the FBK have surged roughly 60-fold since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported, with courts handling at least 90 cases this year alone.
Scientists have been swept up in particular. Mediazona has identified more than ten similar cases against researchers reaching Moscow courts in the past six months. Among them, Higher School of Economics mathematician Andrei Dymov, 38, received the same 3.5-year sentence in May 2026 for donations totaling 3,500 rubles (about $43). Others have been fined or sentenced to forced labor.
The rights group Memorial has designated Rozenfeld a political prisoner. She was taken into custody in the courtroom immediately after the verdict was read.
