Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Russia’s Federal Security Service has turned state-media feeds into a stream of raid footage, each clip a short burst of boots, shouts, and bowed heads.
Short, cinematic arrest clips have become one of the FSB’s most reliable publicity products since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. They loop across Telegram and set the public image of what the agency is doing to anyone it labels a traitor or saboteur.
Memorial’s “Support for Political Prisoners” project, which tracks politically motivated prosecutions, analyzed 70 criminal cases in which defendants appeared in such videos and concluded that roughly a quarter of the arrest scenes were staged. The group describes the videos as a propaganda tool, not a reliable account of what actually happened.
Memorial identifies five recurring elements in the clips: surveillance footage, the arrest itself, a display of items seized in a search or inspection, the detainee’s transfer, and a filmed confession.
The tell-tale signs of a reenactment
Memorial lists the markers that reveal a scene was arranged. Camera operators often appear to be in place before the officers arrive. Arrests play out in deserted garages or across empty fields rather than in homes. Detainees stand oddly calm with armed men around them, ignore approaching officers until the last second, or answer questions without missing a beat right after being thrown to the floor.
Surveillance footage, which would require real prior monitoring, appears in only six of the 70 cases. According to Memorial, all six grew out of FSB entrapment operations.
Confessions are produced the same way. Detainees are made to repeat scripted lines until officers approve the tone and wording.
Beaten between takes
The report quotes the Crimean artist Bohdan Ziza, who says FSB officers filmed at least five versions of his on-camera confession and apology, beating him between takes when they decided his remorse sounded insincere and rewriting the script each time before clearing it with their superiors.
In another case, a Donetsk resident named Georgy Tabuyev agreed to unpack a parcel containing explosives on camera after FSB officers promised him just two years in prison if he cooperated. The video was never released, and Tabuyev was ultimately sentenced to 14 years.
A security service rebranding itself
Memorial frames the clips as part of a broader shift. Mentions of the FSB on the Telegram channels of state outlets TASS and RIA Novosti rose two- to threefold after February 2022, and the share of those FSB posts carrying video nearly doubled over the course of the war. The agency is no longer only arresting people, Memorial argues, it is staging and distributing short films about the arrests so that others watching are frightened out of dissent.
Sergei Davidis, who leads the Support for Political Prisoners project, told the independent outlet Ekho that the videos serve a system: political repression is “an attribute of dictatorship, a tool with which the regime achieves its goals.”
Memorial itself has been a target of that system. Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the parent human-rights organization liquidated at the end of 2021, and in April 2026 it labeled Memorial an “extremist” movement, exposing its remaining staff and supporters to criminal liability. The group has continued to publish from exile.
