'70–80% of Treason and Terrorism Cases Are Entrapment.'

The central thesis of the piece is that repression in Russia and Ukraine is not two different phenomena, but two parts of the same one. Burtin says that in the spring of 2025 he pitched a comparative article on the subject to 30 major western outlets—in Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Britain, and the United States. All refused. The culmination was an hour-long argument with a friend who was a correspondent for Der Spiegel, at the end of which the latter said: “We cannot compare Russia with Ukraine.” Burtin calls this political censorship and writes that the western press prefers to treat the persecution of “collaborators” in Ukraine as an unfortunate misunderstanding, while repression in Russia is seen as a natural consequence of a totalitarian regime. Yet, he argues, both countries are run by security services with shared Soviet DNA.

As Russian forces seized Ukrainian cities, they immediately carried out sweeps and indiscriminately detained anyone linked to Ukraine’s security structures, anyone who had been a mayor, an activist, or simply someone the FSB did not like. Burtin describes a standard pattern: a person is abducted by men without insignia, and for months their relatives do not know whether they are alive. The military and prosecutors say the detainees “opposed the special military operation”—even though no such offence exists in Russian law.

The journalist recounts the story of Natalia Kulakovska from Bucha. On March 18, 2022, Russian military vehicles entered their yard. Natalia’s husband—who had worked for 20 years as a mechanic—was suspected of links to the territorial defence because of green sleeping bags in the basement and hands blackened by diesel fuel. He was forced onto his knees, and Natalia was told to “say goodbye”. A few months later, she found out that her husband was alive and being held somewhere in a remand prison in Bryansk region. Burtin has dozens of similar stories. Belarusian citizen Hennadi Shcherban, who stayed in occupied Hostomel to care for an injured neighbour, was taken away because a Russian serviceman saw him texting his wife—the phone contained an innocent poem. Shcherban has already spent two years in a penal colony in Mordovia without any formal charge. Lawyers are not allowed to see him, and the Belarusian embassy has shown no interest in his case.

The most horrifying case, in Burtin’s account, is the story of Leonid Popov from Melitopol, a young man with schizophrenia whom soldiers abducted three times. After electric-shock torture and three months in an illegal prison in a traffic police building, he was handed back to his father, only to be taken again the moment the father brought him home. He is now in a remand prison in Donetsk on espionage charges. Memorial, whose data the journalist cites, counted 573 Ukrainian civilians in Russian prisons. Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for Prisoners of War reports 2,117 verified cases. The gap between the lists—around 1,500 people—represents those being held in Russia without even the appearance of a legal basis.

In Ukraine, civilian prisoners of war are called “koloboks”. Burtin writes that genuine collaborators are a minority among them—most left with the Russian army. Those who stayed usually did not see themselves as traitors. According to the UN high commissioner for human rights data on which the author relies, 73% of convicted collaborators are simply people who continued to work under occupation. The journalist provides dozens of examples. Liudmyla Soroka, a social-services employee from Lyman—five years for issuing Russian pensions. A teacher, a head of social protection, a chief railway engineer, a dispatcher at a Kherson enterprise—sentences ranging from five to 13 years. Viktor Kyryllov and Viktor Kozodoi received 12 years each for working as drivers in Kherson police. Oleh Kalaida got 14 years, Yaroslav Zabashta 12, both for serving as district police officers in Izium. None of them was accused of punitive actions—only of the fact of service itself.

Especially telling is Burtin’s account of the Lyman “street wardens”—Valentyna Tkach and Tetiana Potapenko, volunteer street co-ordinators before the full-scale war. According to prosecutors, they “sustained the functioning of the occupation authorities by helping people”: distributing humanitarian aid to elderly residents on the outskirts, asking where coffins could be obtained, what should be done about unexploded ordnance. They received five years each.

The journalist stresses that Ukraine’s collaborationism statute requires punishment only for voluntary co-operation, yet courts do not take motives or circumstances into account. Acquittals amount to 0.05%. That almost mirrors Russian judicial practice.

Burtin calls Russian political prisoners “ideological”—people for whom the attack on Ukraine became a personal tragedy. According to Memorial, at least 1,450 Russians have become prisoners of war in this sense. The journalist recounts a number of stories. Andrei Glukhov, a student from Volgograd with cerebral palsy—12 years in a strict-regime colony for two transfers of 1,500 roubles each to Ukraine. Anthropologist Aleksandr Nesterenko—three years for having two songs by the band Vopli Vidopliassova in a playlist on VKontakte. Aleksandr Krichevsky, a wheelchair user from Izhevsk—five and a half years for an internet comment. When he was arrested, his mother was sent to a care home, where she died a month later. Hairdresser Anna Aleksandrova was jailed for five years for reposting a video from a Z-channel showing Russian soldiers cutting off the head of a Ukrainian prisoner. The denunciation was written by a neighbour with whom she had been in dispute over a plot of land.

Burtin devotes a separate section to provocations by Russia’s security services. According to Memorial, around 33 criminal cases are built on a standard pattern. Lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov, who specialises in such cases, says he regards 70–80% of treason and terrorism prosecutions as provocations. The canonical example is the case of 18-year-old Valeria Zotova from Yaroslavl. She began corresponding on WhatsApp with a Ukrainian number, where the interlocutor introduced himself as “Andrii, an SBU officer”. At the same time, a new friend, “Karina”, attached herself to her—an undercover operational measure controlled by the FSB. When “Andrii” suggested that Zotova burn down a village administration building for $2,000, “Karina” backed the idea, found a car, and accompanied her right up to the moment of arrest. Zotova received six years. The FSB’s main trick, Burtin writes, is to persuade a person to send a photograph or coordinates of some site. The very act of sending it is then treated as high treason. Often, photographs of these sites are publicly available, but courts show no interest in their “hypothetical value”.

Mirror-image provocations by the SBU occupy no less space in Burtin’s account. Their victims are apolitical people, often alcoholics, unemployed, or previously convicted individuals. Anna Bukina, a postal worker from Kramatorsk, received a message from “some Maksim with a Russian number”, who flirted a little and asked where the military were in the city. Bukina named one place and became afraid to reply further. She got five years. The journalist separately examines several cases against mentally disabled people. Mykola H., a shoemaker from Lysychansk, naively photographed military equipment for some “Lyokha” from Odnoklassniki—he got 15 years. Nadiya B. from Zaporizhzhia region is serving 15 years for initiating correspondence with an “FSB representative” in order to expose him and inventing tall tales about local partisans.

The most astonishing case described by Burtin is the story of mathematics teacher Halyna Kryshtal from Kyiv. The journalist painstakingly reconstructs the tangled plot: Kryshtal the tutor, her former pupil Aleksandr Vikhliayev, their move with spaniel dogs to the village of Tlumach in Ivano-Frankivsk region, and the strike on the local military airfield on February 24. Village elders took the woman for a saboteur. At the same time, travel blogger Dmytro Kuznetsov, who was cycling with a drone, was detained. Both of them, together with Vikhliayev, were convicted in a case about a “Russian agent network”—all received 13 years with confiscation of property. At trial, Kryshtal, by then completely grey-haired, admitted guilt. Burtin shows that the evidentiary basis comes down to video confessions later retracted by the defendants and an “incomprehensible (illogical) choice of residence”—a tutor’s move to the “backwater”.

Burtin devotes a separate chapter to the “office workers”—Ukrainian call centres that, after the start of the war, received a green light for mass fraud against Russians. According to his data, in 2025 fraudsters stole more than 300 billion roubles from Russians. Every day, Russia receives six to eight million scam calls. Often, the elderly do not merely hand over their savings—scammers also push them into petty sabotage. The journalist gives characteristic scenes: a pensioner shouting “Glory to the AFU!” sets fire to a Sberbank branch, a 65-year-old Muscovite yells “Azov is power!” while throwing a bottle at a Defence Ministry official’s car. Most victims are convinced they are following instructions from the police or the FSB. Seventy-six-year-old Valery Yershov from Vsevolozhsk, acting on scammers’ orders, sold his flat and then set fire to a recruitment office. When he realised what had happened, he hanged himself in his apartment block. Burtin stresses that for attacks on recruitment offices, victims of scammers are most often charged with terrorism—with prison terms starting at 10 years.

Another large category of prisoners of war consists of teenagers recruited on the darknet for quick money. Russian schoolchildren are hired for peanuts to burn relay cabinets, military planes, and helicopters, sometimes with promises of millions. In September 2024, 13-year-old Timur and 14-year-old Aleksandr in Omsk got through a hole in a fence to a parking area and set a Mi-8 on fire with a cigarette—an explosion followed, burning both their hands and faces. One of the so-called “sportiki”, 18-year-old Yaroslav Kuligin, set fire to a commuter train and a relay cabinet near Lobnya; in pre-trial detention, he tried to kill himself twice. The journalist writes that in 2024 Rosfinmonitoring added 93 minors to its register of “terrorists and extremists”, with at least three of them aged just 14. In Ukraine, the situation is a mirror image. From the spring of 2024 to the summer of 2025, 175 minors were arrested there, the youngest aged 12. Russian agents use video games for recruitment and sometimes remotely blow up their own operatives. Burtin describes several such cases in Mykolaiv, Rivne, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Biliaivka—in every case, civilians following instructions over the phone die together with the target.

In the section on prisons, Burtin describes in detail the “basements”—illegal prisons where detainees are tortured until confessions are extracted. This practice, the journalist notes, was refined by the FSB during the Chechen wars. He cites testimony from defendants in the case of the “Kherson Nine”—Ukrainians accused of preparing terrorist attacks against pro-Russian officials and sentenced to terms ranging from 14 to 20 years. One of the accused, volunteer Yuriy Kaiev, described how he was tortured with electric shocks, subjected to the “monkey” torture method (suspended on a pole between chairs), and how an 11-year-old boy was held in a cell together with adults. According to him, in the basement they heard drunken soldiers shouting “Glory to Ukraine”, demanding the answer “as part of the Russian Federation”.

Burtin also provides testimony from the Russian side. Activist Liudmyla Huseinova, who survived captivity in the DNR, said women in the cell were kicked, attacked with a sharpened object, and that in her cell there was an order to “finish off” the political prisoners. According to the Center for Civil Liberties, Ukrainians are systematically tortured in 29 Russian penal colonies and remand prisons. The highest levels are in IK-10 in Mordovia and in SIZO-2 in Taganrog, where Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was tortured to death.

In May 2025, Russia and Ukraine carried out their first exchange of civilians—70 for 120. According to Burtin, this was not in fact a handover of abducted people, but the transfer of Russians taken to Sumy from the occupied part of Kursk region and Ukrainian criminal convicts whose sentences had expired in occupied territories. Several dozen “collaborators” who applied through the I Want to Go to My Own website did indeed leave for Russia—but only after being forced to renounce Ukrainian citizenship.

The journalist reminds readers that Russia’s memorandum at the Istanbul talks included a clause on the mutual release of political prisoners—which is to say that Russia, for the first time, acknowledged that it had them. Yet even among human-rights defenders the point aroused no interest. Among public figures, Dmitry Muratov and a group of Nobel laureates, including Svetlana Alexievich, spoke in favour of the mutual release of prisoners. In Trump’s so-called peace plan, Burtin notes, there is mention of the return of “civilians, including children and political prisoners”, but the wording is vague, and it is unclear whether this implies reciprocal pardons.

The main conclusion of the piece is that the overwhelming majority of those imprisoned under “wartime” articles in both countries did nothing terrible. They either expressed an unwelcome opinion or fell for provocations. States imprison them not to punish criminals, but to make everyone else afraid. Burtin calls this practice a tool for disciplining the population and for the mutual escalation of war. In his view, a reciprocal amnesty could become a huge step towards genuine de-escalation.