FSB agents impersonating Ukrainians online to entrap anti-war Russians, human rights group says
The human rights organization Department One has uncovered evidence that Federal Security Service (FSB) officers are impersonating Ukrainians online to entrap anti-war Russians. According to the organization, a Russian man recently imprisoned for communicating with a supposed “Ukrainian agent” was actually speaking to an FSB operative who was part of a sting operation. Department One, which reviewed the court verdict, says this type of entrapment — illegal under Russian law — has become a routine tactic for security forces aiming to stifle anti-war dissent.
The human rights group Department One found that a Russian man from Oryol, sentenced to four years in prison for “secret cooperation with a foreign state,” was actually communicating with an FSB operative who was posing as a Ukrainian in an elaborate sting operation.
Court documents confirm that the supposed “Ukrainian agent” with whom Ivan Tolpygin allegedly interacted never existed. The court states that Tolpygin, not realizing that he was corresponding with Russian security services, shared sensitive “military coordinates,” an act that authorities argue threatened national security. The judge’s ruling explicitly notes that Tolpygin “was unaware” that “Timur,” the individual he was communicating with, was “acting within the framework of an ‘operational experiment’ by FSB officers.”
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Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with Department One, argues that the FSB’s methods amounted to illegal entrapment— provoking a crime rather than preventing one, a practice prohibited under Russian law. Smirnov contends that the court misclassified the offense, as Tolpygin’s communication was solely with an FSB agent, not a real foreign representative, meaning it should be treated as an attempted crime at most. This misclassification, he says, has resulted in an excessively harsh sentence.
Department One has consistently accused Russian security services of fabricating cases to silence those opposed to the war. They say that Tolpygin’s case exemplifies a broader FSB strategy of entrapping social media users, where agents start with innocuous conversations before steering discussions toward the war and inciting more extreme responses.
