On July 29, the Moscow City Court is set to hand down its verdict against Darya Shipacheva, author of books and podcasts about chronic pain. The prosecution of this science journalist and feminist activist illustrates a new pattern in how Russia’s repressive machine operates. Treason cases involving money transfers to Ukraine — like those involving donations to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) — have been fast-tracked: closing arguments in cases seeking 12-year sentences now take just one hearing, lasting only an hour and a half. And online stalking (in Shipacheva’s case, by activists from the misogynistic Men’s State movement) can be enough to trigger a criminal case, including under repressive charges like treason.
After fifteen months in pretrial detention centers in Rostov-on-Don and Moscow, journalist Darya Shipacheva was formally charged with treason at her first court hearing, held on July 27 in the Moscow City Court. As reported in Mediazona, closing arguments lasted just an hour and a half, after which the prosecution requested a 12-year prison sentence. The trial was held behind closed doors. The defense asked the court to take into account Shipacheva’s admission of guilt and cooperation with the investigation. T-invariant spoke to Shipacheva’s friends and fellow students and learned that the treason charge stemmed from a money transfer to Ukraine. “Darya was born in Ukraine and has a lot of family there. As far as we know, investigators reclassified one of her transfers — made to a civilian — and built the case on it,” one of Shipacheva’s acquaintances told us. Another source told T-invariant that the transfer in question went to a relative.
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Darya Shipacheva is a well-known science journalist, the author of books and podcasts on medical topics, and a graduate student in ITMO University’s Health Sciences master’s program (focused on public health). Darya was detained on April 23, 2025, and taken to a pretrial detention center in Rostov-on-Don, where she spent more than a year before being moved for the last few weeks to Lefortovo [a Moscow detention facility run by the FSB, long used to hold high-profile political prisoners — T-invariant] — a detail that was confirmed to T-invariant by five sources close to Shipacheva.
“We were supposed to meet on Zoom to go over some issues with our thesis projects, and Dasha didn’t show up. She was always so motivated and punctual that we knew right away something was wrong. It turned out she’d been detained a few days earlier. We were all baffled as to why she’d been taken straight to Rostov. We assumed that’s where they send people suspected of collaborating with Ukraine, people facing treason charges, and Ukrainian POWs,” recalls a fellow student of Darya’s.
According to T-invariant’s sources, Darya’s phone stayed online for a long time after her detention. “We saw that activity and realized her devices were now controlled by ‘Comrade Major’ [Russian slang for FSB surveillance — T-invariant], and that all our messages were exposed. It was terrifying. We put the word out — delete everything immediately,” one of T-invariant’s sources said.
According to several of Shipacheva’s friends and fellow students, before her detention the journalist had been receiving online threats from supporters of the so-called Men’s State movement over the feminist views she voiced online. “One of the last messages read: ‘We’re digging up dirt on you, they’ll come for you soon.’ Then, based on activity on her Facebook, Telegram, and Instagram accounts, she realized how serious the threats were and started scrubbing her public information, changing her usernames and passwords, and setting her Facebook and Instagram accounts to private,” one of Shipacheva’s friends told us.
“In those days she was bracing for an attack from those shady characters who’d been threatening her online. She told me about it at the time, but she never shared the actual messages or threats with me — she was trying to spare us additional stress,” said another friend of Shipacheva’s.
BACKGROUND
Men’s State is a Russian movement whose activists harass and target women, children, ethnic minorities, and LGBT people. It was founded in 2016 by Vladislav Pozdnyakov as a closed VKontakte community. On October 18, 2021, the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Court designated Men’s State an extremist organization and banned its activities in Russia. According to unconfirmed reports, Pozdnyakov has since left the country. Information about his current activities is inconsistent: he is linked to several Telegram channels (the best known being “Pozdnyakov 3.0”), sells ads and paid access to his private channels (such as “Bottle”), and supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
According to fellow students and instructors, Darya Shipacheva was an remarkably active, motivated student with excellent academic performance. She was detained just as she was finishing her thesis, at the very end of her master’s program. At the request of the defense, the court received strong character references from ITMO. “A very good student — hardworking, serious. One of the best in her cohort,” an ITMO associate professor told T-invariant. From 2019 to 2025, the journalist was a freelance contributor covering medical topics for Forbes Russia and worked with several other outlets, including Zdorovye Mail.ru, Mail.ru’s health section, RBC, Lenta.ru, Reminder, and Takie Dela.
“As far as we know, these almost a year and a half in pretrial detention passed without major incidents. Dasha received books, various items, and letters, and she had visits with family. She’s in a rough emotional state, of course. As far as I know, she was also against making this public, since she worried it might lead to a harsher sentence. But recently she asked us to invite journalists to the verdict hearing,” a friend of the journalist’s told us.
“It’s extremely difficult for her in pretrial detention — Dasha lives with chronic pain. That’s actually what she studied: she wrote a No Panic about it and hosted a podcast called Life Is Pain. She turned her own pain into meaningful, informative work that has helped a lot of people,” said another friend of Shipacheva’s.
From April 2025 until July 28, 2026, there was no publicly available information about Shipacheva’s detention, criminal case, or the investigation against her. According to T-invariant’s sources, this was a decision made by her family and by the court-appointed attorney. The lawyer later changed, but the approach to public communication stayed the same. Since late 2025, the lawyer has changed again, and the journalist is now defended by Oleg Ivankovich. According to Shipacheva’s friends, it was Ivankovich who developed her entire defense strategy and arranged for her to get medication. Ivankovich did not respond to messages or calls from T-invariant’s correspondent.
[[socialnetworks]]
Darya Shipacheva is now trying to complete her master’s thesis from behind bars and still hopes to defend her thesis.
As T-invariant has reported, the timelines for “political” criminal cases have shortened significantly in recent months. Mathematician Andrey Dymov, for instance, was sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony for a 3,500-ruble donation to ACF less than a month after his criminal case was initiated — after just two hearings. According to defense lawyers, this “fast-track justice” is driven by the sheer volume of treason and extremism-financing cases, which has led to an informal decision to speed up both investigations and trials.
The post A Verdict by Men’s State: <em>T-invariant</em> uncovers the details of Darya Shipacheva’s treason case appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
YouTube, TikTok and Twitch are blocking ads en masse for the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which recruits young people to assemble combat UAVs. Yet Tatarstan’s efficient managers have relaunched the recruitment campaign – through the proxy project Stalin’s Falcons, the Dronecon cyber tournaments with million-ruble prizes, and the game Drone Battle: Ukraine. Details in a T-invariant investigation.
Alabuga SEZ CEO Timur Shagivaleev has registered a patent for an “assessment tool in game form: the multiplayer online strategy Drone Battle: Ukraine.” The strategy is available on its website in three languages: Russian, English and Chinese. According to the Whois service, the dronewars.su domain is registered to the Alabuga SEZ.
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Shagivaleev is listed as the author of three more patents for various game-based “assessment tools.” According to Elibrary, all of them have zero citations. Another patent in his name covers software for conducting and analyzing mass assessments – the Alabuga HR platform. Shagivaleev is under sanctions from most countries in the Western coalition and appears on Ukrainian sanctions lists under the category “engineers of aggression.” At the same time, Shagivaleev did not add himself to patents related to UAV technologies that were registered by other SEZ employees or outside engineers (in Russia, the practice of adding a manager to patents and other intellectual-property documents is common).
Shagivaleev’s deputy for new production, Sergey Alekseev, is listed first among the authors of a patent for a “civilian unmanned aerial vehicle.” Less is known about Alekseev than about his boss. Judging by the widely discussed 2023 investigation by Protokol, which exposed the involvement of teenagers in assembling Shaheds at Alabuga, Alekseev appears to be the main advocate of the company’s signature method of motivating students to deliver results: punishing them by shooting them with paintballs. Looking at the outline of this “civilian” UAV, one can easily recognize the shape of the Shahed loitering munition, also known as the Geran-2. Little information is available about the other patent authors; only Mikhail Zavyalov has an obvious connection to the UAV industry. In all of the patents mentioned above, the rights holder is the Alabuga SEZ.
The abstract to Shagivaleev’s patent (for some reason, Alabuga SEZ chief accountant Anastasia Zyryanova is also listed as a co-author) states that “the main purpose of the program is to familiarize users with the situation in the special military operation zone through a training tool in game format, and to develop tactical and strategic planning among participants in game sessions.” Drone Battle: Ukraine is described as “a training simulator in the form of a multifunctional interactive web application with multiplayer support.” The first recorded uses date to 2025.
T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND
Who is hacking Alabuga’s production and propaganda machine?
On June 27, 2026, it became known that the Alabuga SEZ website had been hacked. Hackers from Black Spark claimed responsibility and said they had obtained a database of employees and supply chains. For several days, the site displayed a Black Spark placeholder page (what it looked like can now be seen here). By July 1, the site had been restored. In spring and summer 2026, an active campaign was under way to block Alabuga advertising; on June 19, the AlabugaGate project announced that almost no integrations remained on YouTube – nearly all had been removed or blocked. Earlier, in May 2026, information appeared that “Alabuga is Ukraine’s No. 1 target for 2026”; according to the Ukrainian Telegram channel Strategic Aviation, “preparation for the operation to destroy it has been under way for several years and may become one of the largest in the war.”
The active phase of the advertising campaign for Drone Battle: Ukraine began in spring 2026 and is still ongoing. T-invariant obtained a commercial proposal that advertising agencies are sending to YouTubers with million-strong audiences. According to the brief, the target audience for the ads is “men aged 18 to 45, GEO: all of Russia (mainly up to 1,500 km from Tatarstan).”
Alabuga’s management uses this multiplayer game to recruit people as UAV operators, mainly through its proxy project Stalin’s Falcons. The project’s slogan: “Our grandfathers developed and produced the best weapons in the world and used them to beat the fascists. Now it’s our turn.”
T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND
Timur Shagivaleev was born on January 28, 1978. He graduated from MGIMO. Since September 2011, he has served as CEO of the Alabuga SEZ. In 2023, he presented Russian officials and state banker Andrey Kostin with a 25-year, 491-trillion-ruble development project for Alabuga that envisaged colonizing four of Jupiter’s moons and incorporating them into the SEZ. According to the presentation, the colonization of Jupiter’s moon Callisto would include the development of biotechnology for human cloning, genome editing, and extending human life to 700 years. At the ceremonial signing of the plan at Alabuga, VTB head Kostin and Russian First Deputy Finance Minister Irina Okladnikova added their signatures (see T-invariant’s detailed analysis of the megaproject).
In February 2026, Radio Liberty published a major story on Stalin’s Falcons. Its journalists concluded that this Alabuga SEZ project was more likely serving PR and HR goals – attracting people “to the special military operation” and to drone assembly – than directly participating in hostilities. Stalin’s Falcons openly campaign among students. As T-invariant previously reported, on April 20, 2026, HSE University hosted a drone-piloting tournament organized by Stalin’s Falcons. To take part, students had to pass a preliminary selection specifically in the Drone Battle: Ukraine simulator. The university’s social-media groups published instructions (here and below, T-invariant preserves the authors’ spelling and punctuation):
“The procedure is simple:
– register on the platform: dronewars.su/ru
– complete 10 training chapters
– win a single-player game in Real Time mode, playing for the Russian Federation
After that, access to ranked games will open – this is your pass to the next stage.”
The competition took place in the atrium of HSE University’s main building on Pokrovsky Boulevard in Moscow. Interestingly, in the report “A Duel of the New Era” on HSE’s website, the press office removed the word “Ukraine” from the name of the simulator.
“Drone Battle is designed as a tactical simulator in which the player commands a UAV troops unit. The player has FPV infantry, vehicles and support stations at their disposal. The objective depends on the scenario: capture the enemy headquarters and hold it for one day of game time, or occupy a neutral base and hold it for five days. After the competition, representatives of Stalin’s Falcons spoke with students and explained how service in UAV troops works today,” the article said.
The Drone Battle: Ukraine simulator is also a key part of the large Dronecon cyber tournaments held in Tatarstan with support from the Alabuga SEZ and Stalin’s Falcons.
“The cyberbattle of the year: Russia’s largest tournament from Stalin’s Falcons!” is how major public pages, Z-bloggers and war correspondents advertise the event (see 1, 2, 3). So far, at least four large multi-day events have taken place: the tournament on April 11-13, 2025; the tournament on February 23-27, 2026; the tournament on April 11-13, 2026; and the tournament on May 8-14, 2026. Cyber athletes were invited to Tatarstan for these events, with all travel, accommodation, meals and entertainment covered, and the organizers did not stint on major rewards. The prize fund of the first tournament was announced at 18 million rubles, while the following tournaments offered 15 million rubles.
The February tournament made the loudest splash in the media, on social networks and on YouTube. It was won by the esports player “Grisha Putin,” who received a check for 3.5 million rubles. He is Russia’s most popular Z-streamer; his second nickname is “Cyberwarrior of the Special Military Operation.” His real name is Grigory Korolev, and he is a student at St. Petersburg State University (in a recent interview, he said he was on the verge of expulsion for poor academic performance and was considering signing a contract with the UAV troops). Grisha Putin regularly draws huge audiences to cyber tournaments, including with Western streamers, and actively promotes the Z agenda in the global gaming community. The streamer says he raises millions of rubles from sympathetic foreign gamers for combat drones for the Russian army. One of the most popular lots is personalized shells, rockets, mines and UAVs: Grisha Putin arranges for Russian soldiers to write foreigners’ wishes on munitions and send photo and video reports (for example, it was reported that an Arab man allegedly asked them to write about his beloved cat).
In press releases from Stalin’s Falcons, Grisha Putin describes his impressions as follows:
“Video games have long been more than youth entertainment. Many countries use them to promote their historical truth, thereby educating young people and giving them their point of view. Russia has begun releasing its own video games with support from the Internet Development Institute. I have already highlighted new domestic games such as the first game about the special military operation, Squad 22: ZOV by SPN Studio, Sparta 2035 by Lipsar Studio, and Gomel Bogatyrs by Playing Cats Studio. As for the Dronecon tournament by Stalin’s Falcons, it is an excellent example of drawing gamers who play popular global strategy games into the latest technologies of warfare. Gamers have skills in strategic thinking, game planning and instant reaction to partners’ actions. This is a unique and already very well prepared contingent for working with real-world projects.”
This is how Stalin’s Falcons describe the rules for participation:
1. You must submit an application on the website and choose a track.
2. Contact the tournament organizers for further interaction.
3. Complete the training in the Drone Battle simulation and play a single-player game for the Russian Federation – https://dronewars.su/ru. Send confirmation of completing the training to the organizers.
4. Collect a package of documents (passport, taxpayer identification number, SNILS) to create a participant card and verify the data. The tournament is held on a closed and guarded site to ensure the safety of participants and guests.
5. Confirm your participation in the tournament after your participant card has been approved.
6. Receive your tickets before the tournament and arrive.
You can expect paid transfer and accommodation; a fair prize fund; and the opportunity to receive an offer from Stalin’s Falcons.
The total advertising campaign has not gone unnoticed. Reviews by participants can be found on review sites. There is also feedback about the “closed and guarded site”:
“The tournament is not a scam, I was there myself. The only thing is that for those seven days you’re basically in prison: there’s almost no connection, you can’t leave the site, you’re supervised, and you sign nondisclosure documents about what you saw. On the plus side, they feed you for free and the food is tasty :), and they also give you their merch (the merch is really cool, in my opinion, but if your size is M, it’s better to try to get into the line first; those sizes are in short supply). There are different disciplines: instead of HoI, I had War Thunder; maybe the next tournament will have HoI. There are several disciplines: War Thunder (in my case), GeoGuessr, Drone Battle and FPV flights (first in a simulator, then on a real one). Points are counted in total. If you win first place in one discipline but are eliminated from all the others, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get prize money. By the way, Alabuga covers the tax on the prize.”
t is difficult to name the exact number of people the organizers managed to attract to their events. Radio Liberty journalists wrote in February 2026 that only a few photographs from Dronecon could be found online: some were taken on the grounds of Alabuga Polytech, and others inside the premises of the Zarnitsa production association in Kazan. At the time, Radio Liberty found only one independent piece of evidence that the tournament had actually taken place: the Higher School of Petroleum in Almetyevsk reported on its website that one of its students had participated in Dronecon. He confirmed to journalists that he had gone to the tournament, called it “cool,” but noted that far fewer than the announced thousand people had taken part in Dronecon. The note is still available today.
[[socialnetworks]]
Radio Liberty also described in detail that many links can be found between Stalin’s Falcons and Alabuga, but no real traces can be found of the Falcons operating as a combat unit, nor of people connected to the unit beyond recruiters and marketers. Stalin’s Falcons have never been mentioned as a combat unit in reports by the Russian Defense Ministry or in federal media. Russian “war correspondents” write about the Falcons only in advertising posts. In addition, Radio Liberty found numerous negative reviews from people who had tried to join Stalin’s Falcons through recruiters.
The Ukrainian outlet 24 Kanal also published a major investigation into the Falcons. Its journalists concluded that Stalin’s Falcons look like “an element of a sprawling network where technology, information operations and controlled PR are combined.”
“In modern war, Russia is building not only combat units, but entire media systems of influence that operate simultaneously in the military, digital and public spheres,” the journalists conclude.
Thus, Timur Shagivaleev has managed to prove to the Kremlin his important role in supplying the key resource of modern warfare – UAVs – as well as the people who will assemble and then operate them. And while the whole world already knows about Alabuga as a physical point on the map where instruments of death are produced, far less is known about the cyber-Alabuga that Shagivaleev and other “Putin’s Falcons” from the Alabuga SEZ are building in parallel. Given the current shortage of personnel for the combat-drone industry, the task of recruiting young people online looks like no less important a national project than keeping the death factory in Tatarstan running. As T-invariant wrote earlier, “esports players are admitted without competition.” That was the headline of an article published by Tatar-inform at the height of the student recruitment campaign.
The post Putin’s Falcons. Alabuga’s CEO patented a game called Drone Battle: Ukraine, while his deputy patented the war’s main drone appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
An experimental physicist originally from Russia is now one of the most undesirable applicants on the global academic job market. Even IT specialists and theoreticians find it easier to secure employment than those who actually know how to turn lab concepts into working experiments. In Europe, the primary legal barrier is a sweeping expansion of European export control legislation regarding dual-use technologies, enacted in September 2025. The underlying bureaucratic logic dictates that since resources are insufficient to separate safe Russians from untrustworthy ones, it is simpler to exclude everyone. Consequently, anti-war students who fled Russia in 2022–2023 are finding themselves blacklisted by Western companies and universities, forcing them to move to China and Arab nations. T-invariant shares the story of scientist Nikita Asmedianov, a clear example of this unfolding crisis.
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The Last Ticket
Nikita Asmedianov comes from Kuytun, a small working-class settlement in the Irkutsk Oblast, where trains barely slow down long enough for passengers to jump aboard and head toward major cities. He earned his higher education at Novosibirsk State University (NSU). Nikita spent eight years in Siberia’s scientific capital before deciding to leave Russia. A year before the war even began, he was already sending out his CV to various foreign universities once a week. In August 2022, he applied to the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology. Then, on September 22 — just one day after the mobilization was declared in Russia — an invitation came from Professor Yakov Krasik at the Technion’s Plasma Physics Laboratory. The letter said that the PhD program would start in October. However, Nikita decided not to wait for October and left the country on September 25.
“Back then at NSU, about a third of the students, graduate students, and professors fled Russia. Some returned later, some didn’t, but it was a mass exodus at the time.”
To get to Israel, Nikita decided to wait things out for three weeks in Kazakhstan. He distributed his belongings among friends in Novosibirsk, sold a few items, and gave others away for free. He didn’t even submit a resignation letter to the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (BINP, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences), where he had worked for six years — he just dropped everything and got on a train to Omsk.
“I bought the very last ticket and managed to get from Omsk to Petropavl in Kazakhstan. At the station in Petropavl, there was some kind of actor, hired either by the FSB or the local administration, screaming at the top of his lungs: ‘Nobody wants you here in Kazakhstan, you won’t be able to rent an apartment, go back, what are you doing here?’ The entire station was packed with migrants, there was nowhere to stand or sit, everyone was scrambling to exchange money and buy local SIM cards.”
Nikita spent several nights sleeping at train stations in towns along the route until he finally reached Astana. There, an acquaintance of Yakov Krasik helped him find a place in a hostel. A bit later, a friend of Nikita’s mother was found in Almaty, and after a difficult struggle to secure a bus ticket, he went to stay with her.
“She let me stay at her place; in return, I looked after her child, cooked, and helped around the house. That’s how I lived for another two weeks in a wonderful city that felt culturally much more comfortable to me than Novosibirsk.”
Two weeks later, Nikita flew to Istanbul, and then on to Israel to join Professor Yakov Krasik.
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At the Technion lab, Nikita received a very warm welcome and was given a dorm room.
“Yakov tested my capabilities, assessed me at first, and gave me his papers to read to help me master the technical language. Within a couple of months, he had already defined my dissertation topic. He told me everything would be great, that after four years of my PhD, I could stay on as a postdoc for another two and a half years. He also mentioned the advantages of living in Israel, suggesting it would be good for me to marry here to get citizenship. I understood that there was no other way to continue working in Israel; I even tried to get married, but it just didn’t work out.”
In his very first months under Yakov Krasik’s guidance, Nikita published his first paper, which continues to be widely read and cited today. Over his four years in the doctoral program, Nikita ran dozens of experiments, published 14 papers co-authored with colleagues, and completed his dissertation on high-energy-density physics.
“I designed wires and foils in simulation software and fabricated them myself, which we then exploded using electrical generators. I calibrated and repaired those generators myself. If necessary, I could build any of them from scratch — just by finding the parts, ordering them, and assembleing it. In parallel, I developed a hydrodynamic simulation for extreme conditions based on Professor Krasik’s research. I managed to refine it to such an efficient operating state that it requires no heavy computing hardware. Meaning, you can run it on any “toaster” (a basic PC), and it will compute everything you need for any thermal explosion. For instance, if you know the input power profile delivered to an exploding object, it will calculate how the object itself burst, expanded, and how its surroundings were destroyed. My software can solve most problems encountered in explosion engineering.”
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Such applications are indispensable in geological exploration and petrochemical processing, given that certain oil derivatives can only be synthesized under these explosive conditions. They are also exceptionally critical for materials science under extreme environments. For instance, testing how a material behaves under immense pressure and temperature can be achieved either experimentally on the generator Nikita and his colleagues built, or through this computer simulation. Naturally, these studies have military applications as well, though Nikita never participated in such projects. This requires special security clearance, involves a certain bureaucratic process. Nobody would offer it to a PhD student without Jewish roots or Israeli citizenship.
“I only engaged in open research, so I can present any formula or chart at any conference without needing extra permits.”
Security concerns have shut Nikita out of more than just military projects. For over a year, he has received job inquiries from Israeli universities, corporations, and startups. Tel Aviv University, Ben-Gurion University, and the Weizmann Institute of Science have all extended invitations, but a Russian passport puts an end to any long-term prospects in Israel.
“Right now at the Technion, a new laboratory is opening up, and they are hiring students who worked under my supervision. Julien Fuchs, who runs the lab, would gladly take me on, but local security agencies have so thoroughly intimidated him that he now goes out of his way to avoid Russian grad students — he steers clear of us altogether, just so he won’t have to face our questions or deal with our bewilderment.”
Once it became clear that finding work in Israel without citizenship was impossible, Nikita began sending his resume to European collaborators he had worked with during his PhD and shared publications with — including the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble and the European XFEL in Hamburg. Yet no responses came from there either. Yakov Krasik also tried to help his student secure a position in various countries. But what used to work quite seamlessly has now become impossible — not a single brilliant scientific paper proved capable of overcoming the black spot of a Russian passport.
Finally, Nikita had a stroke of luck — he was invited to join a French startup.
T-INVARIANT BRIEFING
Export Control in European Universities
Export control serves as a mechanism to prevent the transfer of dual-use technologies to sanctioned states. Since 2025, it has been extended to cover students from Russia, China, and Iran. Academic institutions are restricting access to courses in cybersecurity, cryptography, IT security, and other sensitive tech fields. A striking case is the University of Bonn, where 65 Russian master’s students were barred from an entire track in Communication Management. Similar restrictions are being enacted across Norway, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and other European countries.
On paper, universities point to European and domestic regulations aimed at non-proliferation of military tech. In practice, however, this frequently plays out as passport discrimination: checking citizenship and background history, banning official enrollment, and withholding credits, even when lecture materials remain publicly accessible. Critics brand this as overcompliance and an infringement on academic freedom, given that education itself is not directly subject to EU sanctions.
The Dangerous Russian
Nikita’s breakthrough came via a fellow Siberian, who had completed his PhD in Paris and transitioned into the high-tech industry. It was he who recommended the young scientist as a unique experimentalist for a new startup spearheaded by Catherine Pépin.
“Vladimir and I had worked together at both the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics and the BINP. He handled the theory, while I ran the experiments. He put me in touch with Catherine directly; she quickly conducted an interview and realized I possessed genuine hands-on experience running experiments on the exact system required. We actually began working even before she could send over a formal contract because she was in a massive rush. The startup’s goals were highly ambitious, and the deadlines were extremely tight.”
[[socialnetworks]]
Pépin’s company was tackling a problem in nuclear energy, specifically in the field of “open magnetic traps.” This represents arguably the most environmentally safe type of nuclear reactor possible. They find applications both in clean energy generation and in beam therapy for cancer treatment. These traps operate similarly to gas turbines, but at stellar temperatures — on the order of 100 million degrees Celsius. Fresh, unburned gas (typically hydrogen) is injected into them, quickly blending with the already burning gas, heating up to the required temperatures, and reacting to release immense energy, which is then fed into the consumer grid via a conversion system. Thanks to this continuous stream, combustion byproducts are expelled immediately, making the whole cycle non-stop. Today, this is the most powerful energy source known to science, with fuel that can be sourced on virtually any planet. China, for instance, has a project focused on mining fuel for precisely this type of reactor — on the Moon. This line of research originated back during the Manhattan Project, yet today this energy niche is being actively advanced in only a handful of countries — Japan, South Korea, China, the United States, and Russia (specifically in Novosibirsk). One such gas-dynamic trap at the BINP was managed by Petr Bagryansky, under whom Nikita studied.
“I joined his team almost immediately after starting at the Budker Institute. The work was fascinating: I mastered both vacuum and gas systems, including handling explosive, hazardous gases, all while strictly adhering to safety protocols. They trained me thoroughly, explaining precisely what the consequences would be in the event of an error. Because of that, I work with extreme caution, taking zero risks. These were pure, classic experiments. It was under Bagryansky that I gained the experience to develop this entire system from the ground up, and with some minor support from colleagues, I could fully replicate a gas-dynamic trap system. It’s a massive facility, the size of a standard thermal power plant. In essence, it is a power plant, albeit significantly more complex and hotter. And I partially reproduced it for Catherine’s project. She wanted to launch an open trap project so that France could develop a parallel energy infrastructure alongside the well-known tokamaks. There is hope that the output of the resulting reactor will suffice to synthesize automotive fuel. Essentially, the system would yield enough energy to capture ambient carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and utilize it for fuel synthesis. This is why a massive commercial potential was embedded within these experiments.”
As soon as the offer from Pépin’s company arrived, Nikita submitted all his documentation to the French consulate in Tel Aviv and applied for an EU Blue Card. The second Iran war was at its peak back then. To make it in time for the brief reception hours, Nikita drove over 90 kilometers from Haifa to Tel Aviv amidst rocket fire. His documents were accepted immediately. However, two months later, a rejection arrived: “Pursuant to laws L421-7 and L421-25, you pose a risk to the people of France.” The consul simply shrugged: “I have nothing to tell you. I wasn’t given any explanation. But you are entitled to file an appeal.” Utilizing assistance from friends and AI tools, Nikita drafted an appeal and mailed it to the Nantes administrative court at the address specified in the letter.
“After I was denied the visa, Catherine provided moral support and helped me obtain a recommendation letter from the director of the CNRS. But then, out of nowhere, she dismissed all Russian personnel, including my colleague Vladimir, who had already been working with her for several months. She also rescinded my offer, as well as the offer extended to Vlad, another Russian physicist and Technion graduate student whom she had planned to hire alongside me for the startup. He received a visa refusal with the exact same wording, stating he posed a threat to France.”
Then Catherine sent us a letter that read: ‘Dear Nikita and Vladislav, we would like to write and express our immense gratitude for your contributions to the project. Over the past few months, we did our utmost to brainstorm every possible aspect of the project with you. We made good progress, but we have decided to look for experimentalists within the CEA and the VEST project instead. We hope to cross paths again in the future and support each other’s work. In the meantime, I am withdrawing your offers.’ Word has it she did this under heavy pressure following conversations with French security services.
Currently, Nikita is awaiting the ruling from the Nantes court and delaying his PhD defense at the Technion as much as humanly possible — because once he defends, he will be required to leave Israel. He has no desire to return to Russia. Consequently, he is gearing up for several interviews with universities and companies in countries where a red Russian passport is still acceptable. On his calendar are upcoming interviews in China. Meanwhile, his laboratory colleague Vlad has just secured a job offer in the United Arab Emirates.
The post The Passport Black Spot: How Dual-Use Restrictions Are Sending Russian Scientists to China appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
A questionable publication in Nature, several fake images, a professor with a dozen suspicious papers, a phantom author with an h-index who turns out to be a Zenit football fan from a fan website — this is not an isolated oddity, but part of a system, a cross-section of today’s Belgian academic environment. More in the latest installment of Plagiarism Navigator.
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One of the latest critical comments on PubPeer, a platform for post-publication peer review, concerns a study by Belgian researchers at KU Leuven, one of Belgium’s largest and most prestigious universities.
Experts noticed something odd: an image of the vascular network around tumor nodules in mouse lungs appeared twice, even though the authors said the images had been obtained under different laboratory conditions. The second image was a mirrored version of the first, rotated clockwise and dimmed.
Researchers sometimes use such tricks to conceal traces of scientific misconduct. Nature Communications, which published the results of this study in 2025, is a prestigious top-tier interdisciplinary journal with a high impact factor of 14.7. One would like to believe this was merely an unfortunate technical error, especially since the Belgian authors of the paper had not previously been caught in similar manipulations. But it is not that simple.
Among the eleven authors of the publication, one name stands out: Anna Sablina. Her record includes more than a dozen papers in which experts have found signs of image manipulation. Who is she?
According to For Better Science, shortly after defending her Candidate of Sciences dissertation in Moscow, Anna Sablina left Russia. She first worked as a postdoc in the United States, and from 2009 as an associate professor at KU Leuven. She is now a full professor and heads her own laboratory.
Here is another example showing that the methods of “working” with images in Sablina’s co-authored publications have changed little over the years. The figure below shows histological sections of mouse embryo skin: normal embryos on the left, and embryos with the loss of one copy of the gene on the right. The two images partially overlap when one is rotated clockwise, which should not happen.
In 2020, this paper was published in Circulation Research, a prestigious journal and leading outlet in cardiovascular and translational biology, with a five-year impact factor of 20.8. Among its co-authors we find another name: Mikhail Steklov, a former employee of the K. A. Timiryazev Institute of Plant Physiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and now a postdoc at the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology in Ghent, Belgium. Steklov also has several PubPeer comments in which experts have noticed signs of image manipulation.
Even so, Steklov still has a long way to go before catching up with Professor Sablina. Sablina appears to have persuaded even some Belgian researchers of the effectiveness of her methods. One of them is Professor Francis Impens of Ghent University, who, like his colleagues Sablina and Steklov, has repeatedly been flagged on PubPeer. One of Impens’s papers was published in Nature, whose impact factor exceeds 50, making it one of the world’s most prestigious and highly cited scientific journals.
Here is an example of image manipulation from that paper. The figure below shows a histological analysis of papillomas from three different tissues. But two of the three images partially overlap when rotated, which should not happen.
None of the papers mentioned above, published mainly by teams of Belgian scientists, has been retracted. The only paper by Professor Sablina that has been retracted was co-authored with Chinese scientists. It was withdrawn a year after publication at the request of Sablina’s co-authors. The retraction note states: “We discovered that the data presented in Fig. 1C, Fig. 2D and Fig. 4A in the manuscript were inappropriately manipulated. These manipulations are contrary to the journal’s policy.” Unlike their Belgian colleagues, the Chinese scientists were ultimately prepared to acknowledge their mistakes.
China is also linked to another amusing and instructive story involving KU Leuven and Russia. Several years ago, scientific papers began appearing in various academic journals in which a certain Anthony Lam, a young professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven, was listed as a co-author of Chinese researchers. It soon turned out that no such professor existed at the university.
Nor, for that matter, did he exist at any other university in the world. The Chinese authors had simply invented him, taking the photograph from a Russian football fan website, where it showed a certain Bleder Yakovlevich Kanalgeruch.
The name on the fan website was probably invented as well: translated from German, and possibly from Yiddish, Kanalgeruch literally means “sewer stench,” while Blöder means “fool” or “stupid person.” Most of those papers were later retracted. But now we know this: Zenit fan Bleder Yakovlevich Kanalgeruch has an h-index of eight. By this academic metric, Kanalgeruch even outperforms some members of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
A curious detail: one of the papers authored by the fictional Belgian professor Anthony Lam was published in 2021 in the Russian journal Izvestiya Vuzov. Fizika. This may well be the only journal in the world that never bothered to retract a paper with a fake co-author.
Taking all these circumstances together, one is led to suspect that the fictional Belgian professor — and the subsequent promotion of publications under his name — were the product of a paper mill involving Russians with a strong sense of humor.
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To be fair, questionable publication practices are entering the European academic environment not only from the post-Soviet space. The problem is much broader. In recent years, Belgian universities have increasingly faced forms of academic misconduct whose roots lie in countries in Asia and North Africa.
As researchers from these countries move to Belgium for postdoctoral, teaching, or faculty positions, they sometimes bring with them academic norms shaped in their previous environments — including a tolerance for plagiarism, fictitious co-authorship, publications in dubious journals, and the artificial inflation of publication records.
Here is just one, but telling, example. Professor Hamada AbdElgawad has worked at the University of Antwerp for more than ten years. Yet even after such a long period, experts continue to find serious violations in his publications.
For example, in a 2023 paper published in Molecules, a Swiss journal indexed in Scopus, and co-authored with his Egyptian colleagues, the Belgian professor used a scanning electron microscope image taken from someone else’s article, published several years earlier and devoted to entirely different experimental conditions.
Experts also find in the professor’s record images borrowed from the internet, data falsification, manipulations with experimental spectra, and obvious conflicts of interest. It should be noted that in most such publications, AbdElgawad is the only representative of a European university. The other co-authors come from various countries in the Middle East.
This situation is typical of Asian paper mills, which use some Western European co-authors to give their publications greater weight.
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Of course, the cases described above concern a minority of individual researchers, not Belgian universities or Belgian scientific schools as a whole. But what is the overall picture? On one side, professors with dozens of suspicious papers, postdocs moving from one institute to another with the same set of “tricks,” and prestigious journals that prefer not to notice the obvious. On the other, the fictional Anthony Lam — also known as Bleder Yakovlevich Kanalgeruch.
The absurdity of this situation reveals a simple truth: the modern publication system has long been evaluating not so much science itself as the ability to imitate it. The problem is that it takes only a few percent of dishonest scientists and one or two indifferent editors for systematic misconduct to penetrate the system. Belgium is not an exception; it is an indicator of a broader crisis in publication oversight across academia.
As long as retractions remain isolated events that happen only under external pressure, rather than as a result of universities’ own internal checks, stories like these will keep recurring. And each new case is not merely another bad paper, but a quiet erosion of trust in the entire European academic system.
The post Bleder Kanalgeruch with an h-index: A Tour of Belgian Academic Magic appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
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