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Who is Sofya Rozenfeld, the internationally renowned Russian ornithologist sentenced to three and a half years for donating to Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation?

Source: Meduza

Sofya Rozenfeld has spent her life studying Arctic birds: traveling to Russia’s Far North on expeditions, following flocks of geese in a seaplane, and fighting to protect rare species. Now the scientist, one of Russia’s leading ornithologists with a doctorate in biological sciences, has been sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony for two donations of 1,000 rubles each to the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). Rozenfeld admitted guilt in part, saying she had been unable to cancel her recurring payments because she was on an expedition and out of contact. T-invariant examined why she refused to leave Russia, how her trial unfolded, and what Russian science stands to lose with her imprisonment. Meduza is translating the article with minor edits.

‘They put on quite a show’

Sofya Rozenfeld learned of the criminal investigation on December 5, 2025, shortly after returning from Israel, where she had been visiting her father. The 50-year-old scientist was charged with financing an “extremist” organization over two transfers of 1,000 rubles each to the Anti-Corruption Foundation in August and September 2021.

“She was here in Israel visiting me. And she went back to Moscow sometime in late November. Literally the next day or the day after, they searched her home and made her agree in writing not to leave town without permission. They did leave her passports, though, and took copies of them,” Sofya’s father, Boris Rozenfeld, told T-invariant.

During the search, officers seized her phone and two laptops. Then came months of waiting. Rozenfeld continued working and going on expeditions.

“The first hearing was scheduled six months later. But the witness didn’t show up, so it was postponed. The next one was, too. Then they read out the charges. It was all very pleasant. Nice young women read out the charges, and the lovely investigator kept calling, asking how she was doing, how her health was, what was new. Everything was more or less civil. And there was no sign that anything terrible was coming. Though I think they’d decided everything long before. They put on quite a show,” said Sergey, a friend of Sofya Rozenfeld’s whose name has been changed.

Before each hearing, Rozenfeld packed a bag in case she was taken into custody in the courtroom.

“She knew a prison sentence was possible. But she thought a fine or forced labor was much more likely. The lawyers thought so, too. That’s where they went wrong. I suspect there are general instructions for cases like these. This is already the third recent case in which women have been given prison time,” Boris Rozenfeld said.

“Of course it was stressful. But for some reason, we went to the last hearing feeling relaxed. They’d even let her go on an expedition before that, beyond the Arctic Circle, to the Polar Urals, to tag musk oxen. There was a TV report about her. She only got back on October 2,” Sergey said.

“We last spoke a few weeks ago. She wasn’t making any plans, just waiting to see what would happen next. There was one hearing after another, and she came to every one with her things packed. But they kept being postponed. The last one ended with her being put in handcuffs,” Rozenfeld’s friend and former university classmate, science journalist Ilya Kolmanovsky, told T-invariant.

Rozenfeld’s friends said the court was unhappy that she had admitted guilt only in part.

“The judge and the prosecutor were extremely unhappy that Sonya had only partly admitted guilt. Here’s the situation she was in: She’s a field biologist who spends six months or more a year on expeditions. And most of those expeditions are to the Far North, where they’re working out in the field with only satellite communications. She had all the evidence showing that she was away on a research trip when FBK was declared an extremist organization — there was confirmation from the institute. But none of that mattered to the court. The lawyer even asked: Why go after her? The banks were transferring the money, knowing those payments had been deemed criminal, even though they’re perfectly capable of blocking unwanted and suspicious payments and regularly do so in other cases. Why not go after the bank? The judge let that pass. You could see that long speeches irritated him, period. It seemed none of the defense’s arguments had any bearing on his decision. He’d already received his instructions, and he wasn’t interested in the circumstances of the case,” said Anna, a friend of Sofya Rozenfeld’s whose name has been changed.

“If she’d admitted guilt in full, they’d have knocked a couple of months off. There were three sentences like that this week. Before this, though, they’d left women alone. I think they’re all trying to curry favor now. I can’t see any other reason for such terrible sentences, literally ‘for three ears of grain’ [an allusion to a 1932 Stalin-era law under which people were imprisoned for taking a few ears of grain from collective farm fields],” Sergey said.

In court, Rozenfeld did in fact admit guilt only in part: “I categorically deny, first, that I share extremist views and, second, that I had any criminal intent. When I decided to start supporting FBK, my sole motivation was to fight corruption. I believe we need all the help the public can give. Because even in my own work, in scientific research and conservation, I’ve seen the monstrous forms this evil can take. And I felt that any help in fighting corruption would be a good thing.”

She acknowledged signing up for recurring donations to FBK. Because she was on a lengthy scientific expedition with no access to communications when the foundation was declared “extremist,” she canceled her donations as soon as she returned. Her lawyers even submitted a letter she had sent to FBK requesting the cancellation. But this did not reduce her sentence. On October 7, Rozenfeld was taken into custody in the courtroom at Moscow’s Gagarinsky District Court.

She is now being held at Moscow’s Pechatniki pretrial detention center. She was not allowed to take her packed bag from the courthouse, so she initially had none of her personal belongings.

‘Geese are my thing’

Sofya Rozenfeld holds a doctorate in biological sciences and is a senior researcher at the Russian Bird Ringing Center at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Ecology and Evolution. She is one of the best-known specialists in Arctic waterfowl.

Rozenfeld has said she decided to become a biologist when she was just 5. She grew up in a Moscow family: Her father, Boris Rozenfeld, is a mathematician; her mother is an engineer; and her grandfather, Iosif Rozenfeld, was a full member of the Academy of Sciences with a doctorate in chemistry. Sofya attended a school specializing in French. In the late 1980s, the family moved to Israel, but a year and a half later, Rozenfeld, then 15, returned to Moscow.

“I didn’t think I had the right to force a 15-year-old to stay. When we were leaving, she said she didn’t want to go. And really, why would she want to leave? Everything was great, she had friends at school, and it was a good school with an intensive French program. And anyway, why the hell are you going anywhere? You have everything: an apartment, a car, jobs. I worked at the Academy of Sciences. And I told her, ‘Listen, we can’t leave you here on your own. But if you want to come back, I won’t stand in your way.’ I promised her that. And a year and a half later, she did come back. Of course we were worried, especially during the coup. That was 1991. Yes, fun times. But then everything was fine,” Boris Rozenfeld said.

“Her parents talked her into going for at least a year, to see what life was like there. She went. And a year later, she packed her suitcase and said, ‘I’m leaving. I don’t want to abandon my country at a difficult time.’ She came back, finished school, and enrolled in the biology department. She’s a very determined person,” Anna said.

In Moscow, Sofya lived with her grandmother and aunt and, by her own account, was constantly bringing animals home. Besides a dog, the apartment housed snakes, frogs, fish, and birds. In 1993, Rozenfeld enrolled in Moscow State University’s biology department, choosing zoology.

“We met in our first year. I heard about her before I saw her: People were saying there was someone very unusual in our class. You could tell there were, well, students, and then there was someone you already knew was a scientist. For her, science was a calling, something she was deeply committed to,” Ilya Kolmanovsky said.

At university, Rozenfeld took up photography because she wanted to photograph birds in the Arctic. She also played guitar, studied languages, and pursued show jumping at a professional level. But polar birds remained her greatest passion from her student years onward.

“Geese are my thing. These birds amazed me: Their unique social behavior sets them apart from other birds. Geese are like people. All geese and swans are monogamous. Pairs stay together for many years, sometimes even for life. The young always make their first migration with their parents, who show them where to fly. Those bonds sometimes last for many years, too,” she said.

Rozenfeld began traveling to the Arctic for fieldwork while she was still a student.

“She was the master of those enormous expanses, where there isn’t another person for thousands of kilometers. She could go somewhere in Kazakhstan and sleep in a tent where, on a spring night, it’s minus 16 Celsius [about 3 Fahrenheit]. And see 15,000 geese through her binoculars that no one before her had seen. Make a discovery, find out that there’s a huge population stopping there during migration. She’s a scientist of enormous stature. From day one, you could tell she was working on something extraordinarily significant. And anyone who has ever met her has enormous respect for that,” Kolmanovsky said.

In 1998, Rozenfeld began doctoral studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ A. N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, where she still works. Her main research areas are waterfowl ecology and migration, as well as migratory bird conservation. During migration, birds travel tens of thousands of kilometers, crossing borders between countries with different conservation laws.

In 2016, Rozenfeld and her colleagues began following flocks of birds in a homemade seaplane, photographing and counting them. The light aircraft can fly at the same speed as the birds and take off from and land on water, ice, and small patches of ground. The data allow scientists to estimate population sizes, identify threats to their survival, and develop recommendations for protecting migratory species.

“Sonya has devoted her whole life to migratory birds. She actually followed them by plane. She’s an incredible expert in this field. That’s the kind of person she is. There was no point talking politics with her. Of course she understood everything. All the terrible injustice around her. But her priority is migratory birds. That’s what she lives for, and she can talk about nature for hours,” Andrey Rostovtsev, a friend of Sofya Rozenfeld’s father and a co-founder of the independent online community Dissernet, told T-invariant.

“She’s a very well-known biologist who worked on joint projects in the U.S. and Canada, and French researchers took part in her expeditions. She presented at all the most important conferences in her field. Sonya is devoted to wildlife conservation. She’s a real patriot, not a fake one. She fought to protect all the rare animal species in the Red Data Book and to eliminate exemptions in hunting laws. In the end, she managed to convince the State Duma that she was right. She’s an incredible fighter,” Anna said.

Rozenfeld was the first to count migratory birds systematically. Previously, researchers had estimated their numbers by counting individual birds in one area, then extrapolating the results across the entire territory. Accurate counts are essential both to understanding species’ spatial ecology and to conserving their populations, said Alexandra Panyutina, a researcher at Tel Aviv University’s School of Zoology: “Say you have a place on the ocean coast where huge numbers of migratory birds gather. And it’s a crucial site. If something is disrupted there, it will affect bird populations in many countries, across an enormous area. Disrupting migration routes and stopover sites changes where a species lives and how many birds there are. That’s why research in this area is so important.”

Waterfowl are a difficult group to study: They are hunted, which affects their population sizes and reproduction. Many species also live in remote northern regions where field research is difficult.

“There’s a strong Russian group there working on shorebirds. And the people we called the ‘goose people.’ That’s it. Sonya is the scientific mind behind all this work on waterfowl. And you can’t replace someone of that caliber. She’s the person who designs the research, who has the whole thing in her head. You can’t replace her with a robot. When a researcher leaves, no one automatically takes over their work. And an education isn’t enough — you need to understand where research on that particular problem stands and know who else is doing what. And of course, no one will be able to take over her research in three and a half years,” Panyutina said.

Sofya Rozenfeld had big plans for the coming months: filming “Gusi Rossii” (“The Geese of Russia”) and working on an atlas of geese.

“It’s a comprehensive atlas with descriptions, illustrations, and maps. It’s supposed to cover every goose species found in Russia. She left us all her contacts. We have to finish this work without her,” Sergey said.

‘You can’t study geese from prison’

Rozenfeld’s friends and colleagues said she adamantly refused to leave Russia.

“There are things she’s completely unbending about. Leaving is one of them. For her, it was absolutely not up for discussion, non-negotiable. She understood all the risks, but nothing was more frightening than leaving and finding herself unable to return to the birds she studies. She can’t do her research anywhere else, because the species she studies live only in the Russian Arctic,” Kolmanovsky said.

Alexandra Panyutina tried more than once to talk to Rozenfeld about leaving Russia, but Rozenfeld avoided the subject.

“To me, the situation was perfectly clear from the start. But in all that time, I never managed to talk to her about it. She was very afraid of being set up. Especially since her lawyers were telling her the outlook was good, because she was only required to get permission before leaving town, and she was a woman with a doctorate,” Panyutina said.

According to Panyutina, serious research into waterfowl migration is currently possible in Russia and Canada.

“Until relatively recently, you could work freely in Russia. That’s not the case in most other countries. Scientists face restrictions at every turn — any work requires an incredible number of permits and licenses, and special funding for specific tasks. Besides, moving to another country almost always means a huge step down for a scientist. Here, you’re a leading specialist; there, you’re basically nobody. You start working as an assistant in some lab. No one’s going to give you your own lab right away. It’s very hard to get the chance to do your own research. But then again, you can’t study geese from prison either,” Panyutina said.

The administration of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ A. N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution is not commenting on Sofya Rozenfeld’s sentence.

“They gave the court a good character reference. But after the sentence, they decided to save their own skins. Of course I think they’ll fire her. How can they not fire her if she isn’t coming to work? They’ll fire her. Maybe they’ll wait for the appeal,” Boris Rozenfeld said.

Alexandra Panyutina has little hope for the appeal. In her view, Rozenfeld will not be the last scientist to face political persecution.

“Fortunately, the FSB [Russia’s Federal Security Service] hasn’t come for biologists yet. Things are already very bad in physics. I don’t know a single sane person who would go into hypersonics today. You’d have to be suicidal. In Sonya’s case, we can’t say she’s being persecuted as a scientist. We’re talking about the persecution of a citizen who cares about her country’s future. What’s more, she was simply a victim of circumstances. When FBK was banned, she was on a remote expedition with no access to communications and couldn’t even find out about the ban on donations, let alone cancel them. As soon as she returned, she canceled all the payments. So she didn’t break any Russian law. There’s some hope that on appeal, the court will take into account the importance of Sofya’s research and her important role in the Russian Academy of Sciences,” she said.

“I feel like this state is now devouring everything alive, at home and abroad. The regime sees a threat in people who can put two and two together and refuse to compromise their judgment. Scientists have things they value above all else: science, nature, geese, and zoology. Many people can compromise, but scientists can be extraordinarily stubborn in this respect. What happens next to Russian science? I think it faces what the late ayatollah called a ‘jihad of knowledge,’ in which every scientist has to prove their usefulness to the Islamic Revolution in its struggle against the West. Now all scientists and all fields of science have to prove their usefulness in the war Russia has declared on civilization,” Kolmanovsky said.

According to Haaretz, Israel declined to intervene in Rozenfeld’s case, despite her having an Israeli passport. After she was charged, she sought help from the Israeli Embassy in Moscow, but was told that Israeli authorities could not intervene in decisions by Russian law enforcement because she also holds Russian citizenship.