T-invariant presents the latest regular report Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 37, dated September 30, 2026. The Russian government has approved the Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036. One of the key issues the Concept highlights is restricted access to international scientific and technical information. Below, we briefly comment on what access to foreign journals looks like today and what is at stake.

Update, October 5, 2026: Our full commentary on the Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036 is available here.

In this Chronicle, we will say a few words about how this “restricted access” has less to do with science than with the repressive policies of a state that interferes with scientists’ normal work.

Mathematics has always been — and still is — one indivisible whole. There is no such thing as “sovereign” or “national” mathematics. Any attempt at isolation inevitably leads to rapid decline. Mathematicians in Russia need to read the work of mathematicians in America and Europe. But the reverse is also true: even during the Cold War, Western mathematicians tried to keep up their collaboration with Soviet colleagues, and the major Soviet mathematical journals were translated into English.

In the internet age, one would think nothing could stop scientists from sharing their knowledge and results. Yet since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, the situation has grown increasingly difficult. The dialogue is breaking down.

As T-invariant reported, starting January 1, 2027, Pleiades Publishing, which works with Springer Nature, will stop producing English-language versions of 108 Russian academic journals. According to the Pleiades catalog, these include Doklady Mathematics, Mathematical Notes, and Proceedings of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics. It is unclear who will translate these journals or whether they will remain indexed in international databases. Meanwhile, the English versions of Sbornik: Mathematics, Izvestiya: Mathematics, and Russian Mathematical Surveys, published jointly with the London Mathematical Society, were suspended back in 2022.

Many Russian mathematicians are fluent in English and could, in principle, submit their papers directly to international journals. But the sanctions policies of many publishers, combined with the policies of the Russian authorities, make this difficult and even risky (T-invariant examined this situation in detail in “Black Mark in the ‘White List’”).

T-invariant has written about the “Yaroslavl admins,” who were fined in cases brought by the FSB. Here is a quick recap. Website administrators at as many as four universities in Yaroslavl were fined. The cases were initiated by the FSB Directorate for the Yaroslavl Region. The university employees were accused of hosting on their websites materials and dissertations in which FSB officers had found references to publications linked to “undesirable” organizations [foreign and international organizations banned in Russia; any involvement with them is punishable by law — T-invariant]. The case against Yaroslav Renin centered on a dissertation that cited Yale University, which has been declared “undesirable.” The Prosecutor General’s Office has also declared Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Tufts University undesirable. All of these universities have strong math departments. Some very serious mathematicians work there. And they publish papers.

Suppose the calls in the Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036 are heeded, and Russian scientists gain official access to the work of their colleagues at Yale. What are they supposed to do with that access? They won’t even be able to cite a single paper.

The situation is deeply alarming for Russian mathematicians: Russian journals and papers are becoming inaccessible in the West, while citing Western ones is becoming extremely risky. Say you cite a perfectly permissible journal today — one affiliated with Princeton University, for instance — and tomorrow the Prosecutor General’s Office declares Princeton “undesirable.” Your paper, or even your dissertation, will then have to be either rewritten or simply thrown in the trash. Why take that risk? Better to play it safe and not cite these potentially dangerous Western journals — or, better still, not read them at all.

New Cards

Tatyana Kudryavtseva

September 10, 2026. Tatyana Kudryavtseva, a professor at Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, was forced to resign after 30 years at the university over old Instagram posts containing “extremist symbols” [e.g., a photo of graffiti depicting Alexei Navalny — T-invariant]. She announced this on her page on the Russian social network VKontakte.

Tatiana Tatarinova

September 4, 2026. Russia’s Ministry of Justice added bioinformatics professor Tatiana Tatarinova to its register of foreign agents. According to the ministry, Tatarinova spread false information about decisions by the Russian authorities and about Russia’s electoral system, and also collaborated with foreign agents and distributed their materials, RBC reports.

Igor Zaitsev

July 31, 2026. Igor Zaitsev was detained on criminal charges of financing extremist activity, according to the Interior Ministry’s Main Directorate and the FSB Directorate for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region. The scientist faces up to eight years in prison, RBC reports.

Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (FLAS)

August 29, 2026. The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Montenegro has been added to the list of undesirable organizations on the Ministry of Justice website, T-invariant reports.

Updates

Nikolai Zyuzev

September 16, 2026. The Supreme Court of the Komi Republic [a region in northwestern Russia — T-invariant] sentenced Nikolai Zyuzev to seven years in a strict-regime penal colony in a case over developing a “project directed against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation,” Mediazona reports. Zyuzev allegedly received more than €2 million from 12 organizations, including Germany’s Hanns Seidel Foundation and the German Council on Foreign Relations. “Zyuzev fully admitted his guilt in the crime he was charged with and exposed the other individuals involved,” the FSB press release states. FSB officials claim that Zyuzev was convicted of high treason (Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code). Yet a year ago, he was detained and sent to a pretrial detention center on charges of confidential cooperation with foreigners (Article 275.1 of the Criminal Code).

Pavel Syutkin

September 15, 2026. Moscow’s Zyuzinsky District Court sentenced Pavel Syutkin to six years in a general-regime penal colony for spreading military “fakes” [i.e., “knowingly false information” about the Russian army — T-invariant], a Mediazona correspondent in the courtroom reports. The trial was held behind closed doors. Prosecutors had sought an eight-year sentence.

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

September 4, 2026. Moscow’s Gagarinsky District Court fined Ekaterina Zhuravskaya in an administrative case over ties to an “undesirable” organization, Mediazona reports. The case was brought over links she posted on X (formerly Twitter) to materials from Deutsche Welle, The Insider, Radio Liberty, TV Rain, and Meduza — seven posts in total, published between December 2024 and May 2026.

Misha Verbitsky

September 3, 2026. Misha Verbitsky was dismissed from IMPA, the Brazilian institute where he worked, over his LiveJournal posts, T-invariant reports. The editors have obtained the letter notifying him of the decision. It does not specify which posts led to his dismissal.

Vasilina Orlova

August 19, 2026. The Interior Ministry put Vasilina Orlova on its wanted list, Mediazona reports.

Her entry in the Interior Ministry’s database states that she is wanted under a criminal statute. It had not previously been reported that a criminal case had been opened against her. In 2024, Orlova was fined on an administrative charge of participating in the activities of an “undesirable” organization. The charge stemmed from the anthropologist’s online participation in the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, held in Tokyo in 2023.

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T-invariant is publishing its latest regular report, Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 36, dated August 31, 2026. Azat Miftakhov has published a paper in the French quarterly La Revue de la filière mathématiques (June–August 2026). The paper was written at the suggestion of French mathematician Bernard Randé, a member of the journal’s editorial board and of the international association Solidarité FreeAzat. Miftakhov completed the work while held in prison in Dimitrovgrad.

Azat Miftakhov’s paper is titled “La conjecture de Chui dans un cadre hilbertien” (“Chui’s Conjecture in a Hilbert Space Setting”). Unfortunately, we have not been able to read it. The paper was not posted on arXiv.org, and the journal itself is available only by subscription. However, The Insider published the first page of Miftakhov’s manuscript, which gives a sense of both the subject of the paper and his approach to the problem.

The problem Miftakhov tackled concerns a variant of Chui’s conjecture. The conjecture came about in 1971, more or less by accident. In a short note, the well-known American mathematician Charles Chui asked how to place N unit point charges on the unit circle so that the average strength of the field they generate inside the disk is as small as possible. More precisely, he asked whether this quantity is bounded below by an absolute constant — one that holds for any number of charges in any arrangement. The answer came a year later: in 1972, Donald Newman published an elegant solution — yes, such a constant exists, and π/18 will do.

The conjecture itself is a remark Chui dropped in that same note. It is plausible, he wrote, that the minimum is attained by the most natural arrangement: the charges placed at the vertices of a regular N-gon. Chui offered no proof and moved on to entirely different things. The conjecture remains unproven to this day.

Even the case of two charges turned out to be hard. The proof was found in 2023 by Fedor Nazarov, a professor at Kent State University in Ohio. He posted his answer on MathOverflow, a forum where mathematicians put questions to one another, and where Nazarov has been answering his colleagues’ questions for many years under the username fedja.

Mathematicians have tried reformulating Chui’s conjecture for Hilbert spaces (that is, spaces equipped with an inner product). In this setting, there has been significant progress. In 2020, Evgeny Abakumov (Gustave Eiffel University, Marne-la-Vallée), Alexander Borichev (Aix-Marseille University), and Konstantin Fedorovskiy (Bauman Moscow State Technical University and St. Petersburg State University) posted an important paper, “Chui’s conjecture in Bergman spaces.” They proved Chui’s conjecture in weighted Bergman spaces for a broad class of weights: the minimum is attained if and only if the charges are evenly spaced. But some cases remained open, and the authors listed them explicitly at the end of the paper.

It was precisely this set of problems that Randé proposed to Miftakhov. The first page of his manuscript opens with the words “Let us assume” and contains the statement of the theorem and the beginning of the proof. He looks at the case where the charges lie strictly inside the disk rather than on the circle itself. And what he proves is not an inequality but an exact equality: the energy of any configuration equals the energy of the regular-polygon configuration plus an explicit nonnegative term that vanishes only when the charges form a regular polygon. If Miftakhov has indeed proved this, then Chui’s claim (for Bergman spaces) follows as a corollary. The original Chui conjecture, however, remains open.

On March 5, 2026, three mathematicians from the St. Petersburg Department of the Steklov Mathematical Institute — Evgueni Doubtsov, Anton Tselishchev, and Ioann Vasilyev — posted the preprint “Weighted Chui’s conjecture.” Their work follows Newman’s line of attack: they generalize his bound to arbitrary positive charges and to spaces of any dimension. At the end of the paper, the authors pose several open questions, the first of which is what happens when the charges lie not on the circle but inside the disk.

On March 6, 2026, Bernard Randé received Miftakhov’s manuscript, in which the charges likewise lie inside the disk. These are different problems, but the setup is the same — and so is the timing.

The Solidarité FreeAzat website writes: “In October 2025, Solidarité FreeAzat, together with the Navalny France team and the organization La Libre Pensée, held an evening in Paris devoted to writing letters in support of Russian political prisoners. Among the participants was Bernard Randé, a mathematician, a former teacher in the preparatory classes at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and a member of our association. Instead of an ordinary letter of support, he decided to give Azat what he misses most — a real mathematical problem.”

Getting mathematical formulas into facilities run by the FSIN [Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service — T-invariant] is a challenge in its own right: such letters often never reach their recipients. A long wait followed, and on March 6, 2026, Bernard Randé received a reply from Azat via Solidarité FreeAzat. The letter opened with the words: “And so your problem, which brightened my days and cost me many hours of sleep, became a breath of fresh air for me. Thank you so much for that!” Attached to the letter were six handwritten pages containing the solution to the problem Randé had posed.

The Solidarité FreeAzat website writes: “Azat worked under exceptionally harsh conditions. Over four months in detention — with no scientific library, no internet access, no chance to discuss mathematics with colleagues, and only a few hours a day with pen and paper — he managed to solve a problem that was open at the time.” Here we have to take their word for it, since we have not yet seen Miftakhov’s paper. Still, the fact that the paper was published is a strong signal in itself.

Averil Aussedat, a member of Solidarité FreeAzat and a postdoctoral researcher in mathematics at the University of Pisa, proposed that her university officially invite Azat to present his result. On July 23, 2026, Azat Miftakhov’s wife, Elena Gorban, received an official letter from the University of Pisa inviting Azat to speak at a research seminar to be held in April 2027. If Miftakhov is not allowed to present his work in Pisa in April 2027, one can only hope that on September 3, 2027, when his latest sentence ends, he will be released and able to engage with colleagues and work under normal conditions.

Chui’s problem has been around for 55 years. Today it is being worked on by Abakumov in Paris, Borichev in Marseille, Fedorovskiy in Moscow, Doubtsov and his colleagues in St. Petersburg, and Nazarov in Ohio. Now one more participant is joining the conversation — from a prison in Dimitrovgrad, from the Polar Owl penal colony [a special-regime prison above the Arctic Circle — T-invariant], in a letter written on FSIN letterhead. Not as an object of pity or a media story, but as a colleague — with a new theorem.

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T-invariant is publishing its latest regular report, Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists No. 35, dated July 31, 2026. Russia’s State Duma has passed a law aimed at political émigrés. Human rights advocates say it is effectively a citizenship-stripping law. The Russian authorities are expanding the practice of freezing bank accounts outside of any specific case, on the basis of “suspicion” alone. Extrajudicial persecution is becoming ever more widespread.

According to First Department [a Russian human rights organization that defends people accused of treason and espionage — T-invariant], on July 22, 2026, Russia’s State Duma passed a law aimed at political émigrés. Human rights advocates say the law drastically curtails the rights of Russians who have left the country and been found guilty in criminal or politically motivated administrative cases. As lawyers describe it, this is a de facto citizenship-stripping law: “For now, lawmakers aren’t proposing to confiscate the passports of people named in political cases — but they are proposing to strip them of many key civil rights.”

“Under the text of the law, anyone named in a criminal case or a political administrative case will be unable to obtain a new foreign-travel passport, execute a power of attorney, access government services online, dispose of their property, register a vehicle, or use a digital signature. These are only some of the basic rights that people persecuted by the state will lose,” First Department reports.

Our database tracks scientists, university teachers, and research engineers persecuted in Russia. A large group of them have been labeled “extremists” or “extremists and terrorists” by the state — that is, entered in the registry kept by Rosfinmonitoring [Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service — T-invariant]. For the repressive machine, this is a very convenient form of persecution. Rosfinmonitoring puts a person on the registry, and the banks do the rest: they freeze the accounts — and the freeze takes effect at every bank at once — which makes that person’s life extremely difficult. This applies both to those living in Russia and to those living abroad who keep an account at a Russian bank, to receive a pension, for example.

As a rule, putting someone on Rosfinmonitoring’s public registry required that a case first be opened against them under an “extremism” or “terrorism” article. A conviction was not necessary; not even formal charges were necessary. An investigator would send a letter to Rosfinmonitoring, the person would be added to the registry, and the banks would freeze the accounts. But the existence of an administrative or criminal case, or of inclusion in the Rosfinmonitoring registry, is a matter of public record: it is easy to find out about, and the decision can be appealed.

Back in 2013, Federal Law No. 115-FZ, On Countering the Legalization (Laundering) of Criminally Obtained Income and the Financing of Terrorism, was supplemented with Article 7.4, expanded in the summer of 2025 to cover sabotage. It provides for another way to freeze accounts: with no case opened at all — on the basis of “suspicion.”

On July 21, 2026, Meduza reported: “The Russian authorities have quietly begun freezing the accounts of well-known cultural figures who have left the country. The first to report this was political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, on her show ‘Status,’ back on July 14. According to her, this is being done on the basis of an unofficial ‘secret list,’ without any notification whatsoever. Schulmann said the freezing decisions are made by the Interagency Commission for Countering the Financing of Terrorism and Extremist Activity.”

This kind of covert freezing appears not to have been used before 2026, at least not on a mass scale. Meduza writes: “First Department lawyer Evgeny Smirnov told Agentstvo [an independent Russian news outlet — T-invariant] that the commission’s decisions are supposed to be published under the law, but they are impossible to find, since the commission does not even have a website. Smirnov said that lawyers have been running into cases like these over the past six or seven months.”

We know of accounts frozen in June–July 2026 that belong to people who are not currently in the Rosfinmonitoring registry. It may well be that the Interagency Commission really is compiling a “secret list” of its own, as Schulmann suggests.

A specific charge, a specific article of the code, specific evidence — all of these can be appealed. But a decision by the Interagency Commission, which never discloses what the “suspicion” consists of, is very hard to contest. Formally, the law does provide a right to judicial review (Article 7.4, paragraph 3). In practice, though, to appeal a decision you first have to learn that it exists and read it — and according to attorney Evgeny Smirnov, the decision cannot even be located.

The Russian authorities continue to expand the machinery of extrajudicial persecution, and the emphasis has now shifted to those who have left the country. Until now, we have been able to track persecuted scholars who ended up in the Rosfinmonitoring registry and faced banking restrictions. If a “secret list” exists, that kind of monitoring is incomplete. The registry gives us only a lower-bound estimate, which we can supplement with the testimony of those affected.

New entries

Darya Shipacheva

July 29, 2026. The Moscow City Court sentenced science journalist Darya Shipacheva to 12 years in prison on a charge of treason (Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code). This is the same term the prosecution had requested. The court also confiscated 1.5 million rubles from her and imposed a fine of 300,000 rubles, Politzek-Info [a Telegram channel that tracks political prisoners in Russia — T-invariant] reports. The trial was closed to the public. The defense asked the court to take into account her guilty plea and her cooperation with investigators. T-invariant reports that the treason charge grew out of a money transfer to Ukraine.

Roman Melnichenko

July 22, 2026. The Central District Court of Volgograd ordered Roman Melnichenko, a lawyer and former lecturer at Volgograd State University, held in pretrial detention. He will remain in custody at least until September 20, Politzek-Info reports. Melnichenko was detained in a criminal case over repeated “discrediting” of the Russian armed forces (Part 1 of Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code) [the criminal charge applies to those who have already been penalized once for the same offense under administrative law — T-invariant]. The prosecution was triggered by a post on VKontakte and a video on another, unnamed video platform, both published in September 2025.

Maxim Kravchuk

July 19, 2026. It became known that a criminal case had been opened against Maxim Kravchuk, a physicist from Shchyolkovo, under Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code (high treason). Kravchuk was detained on June 24, but this only came to light on July 19, Politzek-Info reports. According to Mediazona, citing Kravchuk himself, he is accused of sending photographs to a relative abroad. “Sergey Nikolaevich Kazimir is my uncle; the only thing between us is a family relationship. I do not agree with the charge brought against me. I’m ready to swear that I never sent any photographs. The investigation will figure this out,” Kravchuk said. According to his attorney, Kravchuk is accused of ties “with people from the near abroad, specifically with Kazimir” [“the near abroad” is the standard Russian term for the other former Soviet republics — T-invariant]. His attorney also pointed out that the law does not prohibit communicating with relatives.

Updates

Valery Kachin

July 28, 2026. A new case has been opened against Valery Kachin over alleged justification of terrorism, reports Memorial’s Support for Political Prisoners project. Rights advocates have learned that the new case rests on a few remarks Kachin made a year ago, when he compared Ukrainian special forces units to fighters from the Wagner private military company. What exactly he said is not known in detail. So far this is the only episode in the case, but a second may be added, over some comment Kachin made about the Network case during a walk while he was being held in a punishment cell.

Mikhail Volkov

July 21, 2026. Mikhail Volkov has been removed from the Rosfinmonitoring registry, Politzek-Info reports.

Azat Miftakhov

July 15, 2026. The Labytnangi City Court ruled unlawful the Investigative Committee’s refusal to open a criminal case in response to mathematician Azat Miftakhov’s complaint of torture at penal colony IK-18, known as Polar Owl. Investigators are now required to conduct an additional review within 30 days, Politzek-Info reports.

Maxim Kruglov

July 14, 2026. Prosecutors appealed Maxim Kruglov’s earlier sentence. Prosecutor Yulia Guznyaeva filed an appeal asking that the sentence be vacated and the criminal case sent back for a new trial. On June 24, 2026, Kruglov was sentenced to seven years in a general-regime penal colony, but the prosecution was not satisfied with the sentence and wants Kruglov punished more severely, Politzek-Info reports.

Grigory Severin

February 18, 2026. The Paninsky District Court in Voronezh Region sentenced Severin to three years in a strict-regime penal colony under the law on public “discrediting” of the armed forces, SOTAvision reported. On July 6, 2026, the Voronezh Regional Court reduced Severin’s sentence from three years to two years and ten months in a strict-regime colony. This was reported from the courtroom by a correspondent for SOTAvision.

Olesya Krivtsova

July 4, 2026. The Northern Fleet Military Court sentenced activist and journalist Olesya Krivtsova in absentia to six years in a general-regime penal colony under the articles on “justifying terrorism” (Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code) and “repeated discrediting of the Russian armed forces” (Part 1 of Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code). On top of the prison term, she was barred for three years from administering online resources, Politzek-Info reports.

Dmitry Bogmut

June 27, 2026. Dmitry Bogmut fainted for the second time during roll call at his penal colony, reports Memorial’s Support for Political Prisoners project. He had lost consciousness once before, on June 9, also during roll call. His blood sugar was elevated after the first episode and higher still after the second. An endocrinologist has yet to examine Bogmut, because the doctor is on leave. He was excused from morning roll calls for six days. “For now they’ve chalked it up to vegetative-vascular dystonia, some type or other,” his support group writes [vegetative-vascular dystonia is a catch-all diagnosis common in post-Soviet medicine and not recognized internationally — T-invariant].

Kirill Yakovlev

June 22, 2026. Prosecutors asked that the case of Kirill Yakovlev (Glikery Ulunov) be sent back for a new trial. This was reported by First Department, citing attorney Anastasia Pilipenko. Pilipenko writes: “Prosecutors don’t like it when young, happy, and utterly harmless poets go free. <…> On the plus side, for the first time the prosecution managed to call a poem a poem, rather than ‘textual material.’”

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T-invariant releases the latest issue of the Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists: No. 32, dated April 30, 2026. At the end of April, the Russian government agreed to revise and soften the draft law on artificial intelligence published by the Ministry of Digital Development in March. The bill was restrictive and prohibitive in nature, and its enforcement, especially in its original version, could have led to numerous prosecutions of developers, companies, and even users by the FSB. T-invariant wrote about this in its commentary. However, active criticism of the bill led the government to retreat.

The main concession to business was the abandonment of the requirement that “sovereign” and “national” models be trained exclusively on data assembled in Russia by Russian citizens. Businesses had warned that there was catastrophically little such data in the public domain, that compliance with this requirement would increase the cost of AI deployment by 20–40 percent, and that it would slow time to market by a factor of two. The authorities agreed. AI models may now be trained on any available data, regardless of their source. At the same time, the requirement that large AI services (with more than 500,000 users) register as organizers of information dissemination was removed. This would have obliged them to install SORM surveillance systems and provide the security services with direct access to user data.

Throughout these discussions, no one spoke publicly about what everyone in the industry already knows. The real technological scheme of the Russian AI market looks roughly like this, or is moving toward this configuration: Chinese Huawei chips, Chinese open models such as DeepSeek or Qwen, additional training on Russian-language material, and output filters blocking politically undesirable content. (On this Russian-Chinese setup, see T-invariant’s article “Sovereign Intelligence on Chinese Chips” and commentary by T-invariant editor Alexander Sergeev.) It is a workable and relatively inexpensive scheme: operating the open Qwen model costs tens of times less than Western equivalents. This is precisely the model that business was defending when it pushed to scrap restrictions on data sources. And in the end, it is this model to which the authorities adapted.

However, the law preserved the main control mechanism: a registry of “trusted models,” mandatory for the public sector and critical infrastructure. Certification is to be carried out by the FSB and FSTEC (the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control — the agency historically responsible for protecting state information systems from foreign technical intelligence). The idea is clear: before allowing a model near state secrets, the government wants to check whether there is anything suspicious inside it. The problem is that, in principle, this is extremely difficult to verify.

Current research points to several difficult problems that arise when auditing a model. Here are just a few of them. In so-called distillation — when one model (the student) is trained on the output data of another model (the teacher) — the student inherits the teacher’s hidden preferences even if the training data appear completely neutral. Anthropic researchers called this effect “a love of owls.” The somewhat odd name comes from a demonstration example: the teacher AI was trained so that, among all birds, it preferred owls. The student — an AI of the same architecture — was then trained on the teacher’s output data, and owls were never mentioned at all. Nevertheless, the student retained the teacher’s preference. The authors of the paper showed that this “love of owls” is transmitted through statistical patterns invisible to ordinary inspection. In other words, in some cases a Russian model trained on Qwen data will retain the teacher model’s preferences, but inspection cannot “catch” those preferences — such control methods simply do not exist.

In addition, a “trigger” can be deliberately embedded in the training data — a rare phrase or construction that causes the model to behave completely differently from its normal mode. Standard testing will not reveal such a trigger. To find it, one simply has to know the phrase. But even if the model itself is flawless, agentic systems — where AI has access to email, documents, and corporate databases — create an entirely different attack surface. Aim Security showed how, through an ordinary email in Outlook, Microsoft Copilot could be made to silently extract an organization’s confidential data and send it to an attacker — without a single click on the part of the victim and without leaving any trace in the logs. No model certification could have prevented that. The model is fine; the vulnerability lies in the system architecture.

DeepSeek is distributed under an open license: the model weights are available, it can be deployed on one’s own servers, and it can be studied. This creates an illusion of auditability. But DeepSeek’s training data are closed, and that is precisely where undesirable properties may be hidden, if there are any. FSTEC understands this no worse than anyone else. The result is a strange configuration: the agency receives formal authority to certify something that, technically, cannot be fully audited, while the Chinese origin of these models rules out awkward questions to the developers of the training data — China is a “friend forever; how could we possibly suspect it?” As a result, certification turns not into a protective mechanism but into a bureaucratic procedure that creates the appearance of control, while also proving very costly for business.

Pavel Krasheninnikov, chairman of the State Duma Committee on State Building and Legislation and head of the Presidential Council for the Codification of Civil Legislation, sharply rejected the bill: “The Civil Code is a foundation, and trying to build separate structures on top of it for every new technology, in ways that contradict it, is a path to legal chaos. If there are a few sensible ideas of a public-law nature, their place is in sector-specific legislation, not in an empty legislative shell.”

But there is also something worth noting that is rare in today’s Russia. More than 150 experts and representatives of the largest companies took part in the discussion of the bill. Business openly criticized specific provisions and succeeded in having them removed. The Presidential Council publicly rejected the government’s initiative. The law was genuinely debated, and real amendments were made. This does not mean that subsequent by-laws from the FSB and FSTEC will not restore what has now been abandoned. But the very fact of such bargaining is a rare sign that Russian technological policy still retains a certain pragmatism.

Almost certainly, this is connected to the military applications of AI: in drones, in processing intelligence data, and in logistics. This is no longer theory; it is a real war. To regulate civilian AI so heavily that its development comes to a halt would also mean cutting back military applications. This argument almost certainly came up in closed-door discussions. It may well have been the decisive one.

New Cards

Stanford University

April 10, 2026. Russia’s Justice Ministry added Stanford University to the list of foreign organizations whose activities are deemed undesirable in Russia. The Prosecutor General’s Office made the decision on March 26, Kommersant reports. Media reports did not provide the reasoning behind it.

Alexander Kabanov

April 17, 2026. Russia’s Justice Ministry added Russian-American chemist Alexander Kabanov — a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a professor at the University of North Carolina — to the foreign agents register. According to the ministry, Kabanov disseminated false information about decisions made by the Russian authorities and the policies they pursue, opposed the special military operation in Ukraine, and participated in the creation and dissemination of materials and messages by foreign agents and organizations deemed undesirable in the Russian Federation, RIA Novosti reports.

Nikolai Testoyedov

April 9, 2026. The Central District Court of Krasnoyarsk placed Academician Nikolai Testoyedov under house arrest — the former director general of JSC Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems, Russia’s principal satellite manufacturer, according to the joint press service of the courts of Krasnoyarsk Krai. Testoyedov was charged with large-scale fraud (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code), Vedomosti reports.

Updates

Azat Miftakhov

April 22, 2026. Novaya Gazeta reported that “Azat Miftakhov is being transferred to serve his sentence in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug,” according to his support group. “This is connected with the terms of the sentence, under which Miftakhov must spend a year and a half of his four-year term in a strict-regime penal colony.” The paper notes that Kharp, where Miftakhov is being transferred, has two colonies: IK-3 “Polar Wolf,” a special-regime colony where Alexei Navalny was held before his death, and IK-18 “Polar Owl,” which has both strict- and general-regime sections.

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T-invariant is issuing its regular report, the Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists, No. 34, dated June 30, 2026. From June 8 to 14, the fourth edition of the “You Are Not Alone” marathon in support of political prisoners took place, raising more than 14 million rubles over the week. The funds raised are used to help people in Russia who are imprisoned on politically motivated charges, and to their families — covering the cost of legal representation, prison visits, deposits into inmates’ accounts with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), food, and medicine.

T-invariant is issuing its regular report, the Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists, No. 34, dated June 30, 2026. From June 8 to 14, the fourth edition of the “You Are Not Alone” marathon in support of political prisoners took place, raising more than 14 million rubles over the week.

The funds raised are used to help people in Russia who are imprisoned on politically motivated charges, and to their families — covering the cost of legal representation, prison visits, deposits into inmates’ accounts with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), food, and medicine. The money also supports people who have been left without support after a loved one’s arrest, as well as those who have been released after serving their sentences.

T-invariant took part in the marathon, as it does every year. T-invariant Editor-in-Chief Olga Orlova called on our readers and viewers to support political prisoners. We have been maintaining the Chronicle for almost three years now. Our database currently contains 170 individual case files. About 40 of the scientists in it are currently behind bars.

In this issue of the Chronicle, we have added a new case file: that of Olga Orlova. Russia’s Ministry of Justice designated Olga Orlova — a Candidate of Philological Sciences (PhD equivalent), science journalist, and T-invariant’s editor-in-chief — a “foreign agent.”

We have written several times about the debate over the Russian government’s proposed AI-regulation bill. According to RBC, that debate has led to major changes to the bill — not just in the details, but on substantive issues, chiefly those concerning oversight of how AI models are developed and used.

After sharp criticism from the business community, the Russian government presented an updated version of the bill, cutting the number of provisions from 21 to 13. The concept of a “trusted” model was dropped, but “sovereign” and “national” models remain, and they must comply with Russian law and store their data within the country. The law is now meant to regulate only large foundation models with more than 1 billion parameters. The requirement that such models be built exclusively on Russian data by Russian citizens was scrapped, and the new draft no longer bans the use of foreign neural networks to train models. It was precisely the requirement to train on Russian data that drew the sharpest criticism.

The registry of “trusted” models was supposed to be overseen by the FSB and FSTEK (the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control — an agency historically responsible for protecting state information systems from foreign technical intelligence services). That registry has been dropped, or at least the law no longer provides for one. But experts note that the bill remains quite vague, and how it actually functions will depend on a whole package of implementing regulations whose content is still unknown. The main provisions may take effect on March 1, 2027, with certain rules coming into force as early as September 1, 2026.

New case files

Viktor Kazakov

June 22, 2026 The Sverdlovsk Regional Court sentenced 71-year-old engineer Viktor Kazakov of Novouralsk to a year of forced labor on charges of the rehabilitation of Nazism (Part 4, Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code), Mediazona reports. The court ordered a year of forced labor with 10% of his wages withheld for the benefit of the state. He was also barred for two years from administering websites and posting material online, Kommersant reports.

Grey Boltachev

June 4, 2026 The Leninsky District Court in Yekaterinburg sentenced Grey Boltachev, a researcher at the Institute of Electrophysics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to five days of administrative detention on a charge of petty hooliganism, Mediazona reports. The scientist had been detained at his workplace on June 3. Police formally accused him of “using obscene language in a public place.” Boltachev linked his administrative prosecution to his plans to run for the Sverdlovsk Regional Legislative Assembly on the Yabloko party ticket — regional parliamentary elections are set for this September — Kommersant reports. Boltachev was released from custody on June 8, Yabloko reports.

Olga Orlova

May 22, 2026 Russia’s Ministry of Justice added science journalist and T-invariant editor-in-chief Olga Orlova to the register of foreign agents, Vedomosti reports.

According to the Ministry, Orlova spread “false information” about the decisions and policies of Russian government bodies. She also spoke out against the “special military operation” in Ukraine and gave interviews to foreign media outlets. In addition, the journalist created and distributed materials produced by foreign agents and organizations designated “undesirable” in Russia, RBC reports.

Updates

Kirill Yakovlev

June 8, 2026 The Kuibyshevsky District Court in St. Petersburg dismissed the criminal case against poet Glikeriy Ulunov (real name Kirill Yakovlev). He had been charged with “organizing activity aimed at inciting suicide” (Part 2, Article 110.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). His lawyers managed to get the writer released from criminal liability, even though the prosecutor strongly objected, Department One reports.

Azat Miftakhov

June 29, 2026 A court ruled it unlawful that Elena Gorban — mathematician Azat Miftakhov’s wife and defense attorney — was denied access to him after he had been tortured at Penal Colony No. 18 “Polar Owl” in Kharp. On June 23, Gorban was likewise refused a visit with Miftakhov, even though she was entitled to one as his defense counsel, Mediazona reports.

Yuri Pivovarov

June 28, 2026 The Gagarinsky District Court in Moscow convicted Yuri Pivovarov — former director and research director of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences (INION) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, whom the Ministry of Justice has designated a “foreign agent” — in absentia, sentencing him to seven years in a general-regime penal colony on charges of fraudulently employing staff, RBC reports.

Tamara Eidelman

June 19, 2026 The Moscow City Court convicted historian Tamara Eidelman in absentia and sentenced her to eight years in prison on charges of rehabilitating Nazism (Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code) and spreading “fakes” about the army (Article 207.3, Part 2, Clause “d”), Meduza reports.

Mikhail Verbitsky

June 13, 2026 Mikhail Verbitsky was detained at Yerevan Airport, the TV network Rain (Dozhd) reported. Verbitsky was placed in a detention facility. As Meduza reports: “According to Ani Chatinyan, a lawyer with the Yerevan office of the Helsinki Civil Assembly ‘Vanadzor,’ Verbitsky was detained over a criminal case against him in Russia. She explained that if Russia submits an extradition request, Verbitsky would, under the law, be held for 40 days; if not, he would be released after 72 hours.” No such request had arrived by June 15. Mikhail Verbitsky was released from custody in Armenia. This was laterreported by his lawyer, Vache Simonyan, to the Armenian service of Radio Liberty. Verbitsky left Armenia on June 15, Meduza reports.

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T-invariant releases its latest press release, “Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists” No. 33, dated May 31, 2026. The major event of the past month was the conclusion of the “hypersonics case.” On May 5, 2026, a Novosibirsk court handed down sentences to physicists Valery Zvegintsev and Vladislav Galkin. Both scientists were sentenced to 12 years and 6 months in a maximum-security penal colony under Article 275 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (high treason).

T-invariant published an article headlined “The Old to Prison, the Young to the Exit: The Final Verdict in the Hypersonic Scientists Case,” in which it summarized the 11-year-long case against Russian physicists. Formally, the case is not yet over, as the sentences for the last two defendants, Valery Zvegintsev and Vladislav Galkin, have not yet entered into force — an appeal in cassation is pending. However, both scientists have been found guilty of high treason and sentenced to 12 years and 6 months in a maximum-security penal colony, while the minimum term under Article 275 of the Criminal Code is 12 years. It is unlikely that the cassation court will reduce the sentence, but it could increase it; we are aware of such cases.

In total, 11 scientists have been prosecuted in cases related to hypersonics over the past 11 years. Lawyer and human rights activist Ivan Pavlov, in an interview with T-invariant, draws attention to an unusual detail: “What is surprising in the Zvegintsev and Galkin cases is that they were under house arrest, and it is even more surprising that they remained under house arrest even after the guilty verdict was handed down with such a long prison term. Usually, people are taken into custody immediately in the courtroom after such sentences. I think the authorities have started to wonder: is everything moving in the right direction? Zvegintsev is 82 years old; he might not survive the transfer and the colony, and this is bound to worry the security services. These scientists are people who served the regime faithfully, forged its military might, and they got caught in the crossfire of the system. The regime may be starting to wonder: are we persecuting the right people? Are we making enemies out of the wrong ones? The problem is that the propaganda and security machine has been set in motion and is not so easy to stop anymore. It mows down its own people, too.”

Following the delivery of the verdicts, the list of the ten longest prison terms handed down to scientists for “high treason” has changed. The top ten now looks as follows:

Artem Khoroshilov — 21 years

Alexey Vorobyov — 20 years

Ruslan Shadiev — 18 years

Aleksandr Shiplyuk — 15 years

Anatoly Maslov — 14 years

Dmitry Kizhmenev — 13 years

Valery Zvegintsev — 12 years and 6 months (*)

Vladislav Galkin — 12 years and 6 months (*)

Valery Golubkin — 12 years

Anatoly Gubanov — 12 years

(*) — The sentence has not yet entered into legal force.

[[socialnetworks]]

New Files

Mariya Snegovaya

May 26, 2026. The Savyolovsky District Court of Moscow granted a motion for the arrest of political scientist Mariya Snegovaya, who is accused of “disseminating knowingly false information about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation” (Part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code). The arrest warrant in absentia is two months from the date of actual detention, reports TASS.

Andrey Dymov

May 25, 2026. The Zyuzinsky District Court of Moscow sentenced mathematician and Higher School of Economics assistant professor Andrey Dymov to three and a half years in a penal colony in a case involving donations made to the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF established by Alexey Navalny). Dymov was found guilty of financing extremism (Part 1 of Article 282.3 of the Criminal Code), reports T-invariant. According to Mediazona, he set up a recurring donation on August 5, 2021, and donated a total of 3,500 rubles [$48] to the ACF. He pleaded guilty. His criminal case went to trial in late April.

Svetlana Mesyats

May 21, 2026. The Tverskoy District Court of Moscow, at the request of an investigator from the Interior Ministry, placed Svetlana Mesyats, a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, under house arrest. She is accused of fraud on an especially large scale (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Russian Criminal Code), reports Vedomosti.

Sergey Erofeev

May 15, 2026. The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation included sociologist Sergey Erofeev in the register of “foreign agents.” The ministry claims that Erofeev disseminated materials from foreign agents, participated in the creation and distribution of messages from organizations deemed “undesirable” in Russia, and also broadcast, according to the statement, “fakes” about the government and spoke out against the hostilities in Ukraine, reports Vedomosti.

Evgeny Onishchenko

May 14, 2026. The Tverskoy Court of Moscow sentenced former Lebedev Physical Institute (FIAN) researcher Evgeny Onishchenko to 1.5 years of compulsory labor in a case involving a transfer of 5,000 rubles [$70] to the ACF, reports Mediazona.

Mikhail Epstein

May 8, 2026. The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation included philosopher Mikhail Epstein in the register of “foreign agents.” According to the Ministry of Justice, “M. N. Epstein disseminated misleading information about the decisions made by the public authorities of the Russian Federation and the policies they pursue,” reports TASS, citing the ministry’s website.

Igor Efimov

May 8, 2026. The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation included biophysicist Igor Efimov in the register of “foreign agents.” According to the Ministry of Justice, “I. R. Efimov took part in disseminating, to an unlimited audience, messages and materials from foreign agents and organizations included in the list of foreign and international organizations whose activities have been recognized as undesirable in the Russian Federation,” reports TASS, citing the ministry’s website.

Updates

Vladislav Galkin

May 5, 2026. A Novosibirsk court sentenced Vladislav Galkin to 12 years and 6 months in a maximum-security penal colony under Article 275 of the Criminal Code (“high treason”), reports RBC. Before the verdict, the scientist was under house arrest. The preventive measure will remain in place until the verdict enters into force.

Valery Zvegintsev

May 5, 2026. A Novosibirsk court sentenced Valery Zvegintsev to 12 years and 6 months in a maximum-security penal colony under Article 275 of the Criminal Code (“high treason”), reports RBC. Before the verdict, the scientist was under house arrest. The preventive measure will remain in place until the verdict enters into force.

Azat Miftakhov

May 4, 2026. Azat Miftakhov reported that he had been subjected to torture at the Polar Owl penal colony in Kharp. Miftakhov stated that he was tortured upon arrival in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug — the Polar Owl special-regime colony in Kharp. His account was obtained and published by The Insider.

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