Russia’s FSB jailed Konstantin Kochanov and promised him treason charges. Then investigators made a crucial paperwork error.

In 2023, on the eve of Russia’s patriotic Victory Day celebration, red Xs began appearing on streets in Moscow. Rumors that their purpose was to help attackers aim missiles at the city started spreading on Telegram almost immediately. The following day, a 25-year-old electrician named Konstantin Kochanov was arrested for drawing the marks. He’d been instructed to do so by an anonymous Telegram account that contacted him after he reached out to Ukraine’s “I Want to Live” program. After spending several months in pre-trial detention, where he awaited likely treason charges, Kochanov was released and managed to flee Russia — thanks to a lucky mistake by investigators and assistance from human rights workers. Meduza shares an English-language summary of Kochanov’s story, which was first reported by Department One and Mediazona.

On May 8, 2023, photos of large red Xs on Moscow streets began circulating on Telegram. Users quickly began speculating that the marks had been drawn by Ukrainian saboteurs — and that they were intended to help pro-Ukraine attackers aim missiles or drones at the city. The channel War on Fakes, which is associated with the Russian Defense Ministry, posted that the Xs were “geodetic location markings” drawn for the purpose of “topographic surveying.”

The following day, the authorities arrested the person responsible for the marks: a 25-year-old electrician named Konstantin Kochanov. Officers approached Kochanov as he was walking to the store, handcuffed him, and put him in a tinted vehicle full of masked officers. The first question they asked him in his interrogation was “Who does Crimea belong to?” After the police threatened to torture him, he says, he decided to tell them the truth.

Kochanov says he first became skeptical of Russia’s ruling authorities in 2019, when he began watching YouTube videos from opposition groups like Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. He opposed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine from the beginning. He learned about Ukraine’s “I Want to Live” program, which purportedly helps Russian soldiers safely surrender, from the Ukrainian blogger Volodymyr Zolkin. In the spring of 2023, Kochanov reached out to the project, telling them that he wanted to go ahead and establish contact in case he was later drafted and sent to war. After adding him to the program’s database, a representative asked him if he could help with something. He was subsequently put in touch with someone using a different Telegram account who asked him to draw anti-war graffiti in public areas.

At the person’s instruction, Kochanov left a number of graffiti messages around the city, including one reading: “Brother, remember the ruins of Grozny. Don’t fight for the Rus. occupiers.” When the person offered to pay him for the messages, he says, he was surprised but accepted the money because he had “financial difficulties.” When his contact asked him to draw the Xs on the streets ahead of May 9, he agreed, assuming the stunt was “only meant to scare people.”

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On May 10, a Moscow court sentenced Kochanov to 15 days in jail on charges of disobeying police. Mediazona notes that the story laid out in his case records differs slightly from his own account. Among other things, the file says he was initially contacted over Telegram about an opportunity to earn some extra money and that he first refused but eventually agreed.

“I want to note that I understand that I was corresponding with specially trained people who worked for Ukraine’s security forces and who were acting in the interests of Ukraine under the guise of a Telegram bot,” the records quote him as saying. The records also indicate that in August 2022, Kochanov traveled to the Krasnodar region, where he took photos of military vehicles and sent them to the Belarusian opposition outlet Nexta.

Soon after Kochanov’s arrest, his family contacted the human rights organization Department One on his behalf. Kochanov immediately stopped testifying, pleading Russia’s constitutional right to remain silent. On May 16, he was charged with disorderly conduct motivated by political hatred — a felony offense. According to lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov, this is a common method used by Russia’s security services to send a suspect to pre-trial detention. Kochanov was visited in his remand prison by officers from the Federal Security Service (FSB), who told him they were preparing a treason case against him for drawing the Xs and assisting Ukrainian Telegram channels.

Kochanov remained in prison until the end of summer 2023. According to Smirnov, the FSB officers who ordered police to open the felony case against Kochanov forgot to account for the laws governing preliminary investigations, which can only last for a certain amount of time before the main investigation begins. When Kochanov’s preliminary investigation period expired and his case was transferred to the appropriate department, the investigator who received it failed to file a request for the court to extend his detention. “The detention center called the investigator and said they were releasing Kochanov because his [remand order] had expired. And the investigator came, called the lawyer, and they had him sign a recognizance form [pledging not to leave the city],” Smirnov said.

Suspecting that Kochanov would soon be arrested again, this time on treason charges, human rights advocates came up with a plan to help him escape from Russia. He now lives abroad, where he’s found a job assembling electrical panels. He told Mediazona that, given the chance, he would draw the Xs on the street again: “I would agree, just not in the center of Moscow. And not so many in such a short period of time.”