Over 100 criminal cases launched for donations to Navalny’s foundation. Mediazona is tracking the nationwide crackdown on supporters of the Anti‑Corruption Foundation

At least 114 criminal cases have been launched in Russia over donations to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) after it was outlawed as an “extremist” organisation in the summer of 2021, a new Mediazona count has found. The tally is based on court records, press releases from law enforcement agencies, and information provided by the defendants. The crackdown has targeted not only activists but also regular people such as teachers and programmers.

Mediazona has tracked these prosecutions across 49 Russian regions, from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea in the West to Magadan on the Pacific coast in the Far East. Moscow has the highest number of known cases (17), followed by the southern Krasnodar region (11). The Sverdlovsk region in the Urals and the Kaliningrad region have seven and six cases, respectively.

The cases, which investigators build using information from Russian banks, are typically very similar. Investigation times have also shortened significantly. While a preliminary investigation could last several months in 2023, Mediazona is now aware of cases being processed in just one week.

To date, 88 of the 114 cases have been sent to court, with the rest still under investigation. The rate of prosecutions has accelerated sharply: more cases have reached the courts in the first nine months of 2025 (55) than in the previous three years combined (33). Only two cases went to court in 2022, four in 2023, and 27 in 2024.

Of the 79 verdicts handed down so far, over 80% have resulted in non-custodial sentences. Courts have issued fines in 56 cases and suspended sentences in eight, with one person sentenced to compulsory labour. Fourteen people have received prison sentences, three of them in absentia. Moscow’s courts are responsible for the majority of these prison terms, with nine verdicts.

In September, a court toughened the sentence for 60-year-old folklorist Valery Ledkov from Khanty-Mansiysk in Siberia, converting his initial 120,000-rouble fine into a three-year prison term upon appeal. This marks the first time a fine has been replaced with a custodial sentence in a regional case; a Moscow court previously did the same for Moscow resident Anton Grishin.

Moscow City Court declared the Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption an “extremist organisation” in June 2021, a ruling that came into force on August 4. The following day, the foundation launched a new donation drive using the US-based payment service Stripe.

The team believed the platform would be secure, assuming Stripe would not cooperate with Russian security services. However, on the first day of the new campaign, a portion of the ACF’s website address, world.fbk.in, appeared in some donors’ bank statements.

As Mediazona previously established, security services analysing these early bank statements identified other common transaction markers, most importantly a unique merchant ID. This significantly widened the pool of potential suspects, and the merchant ID has since become the key piece of evidence in the prosecutions.

In early August, Mediazona published an investigation into how the criminal cases against donors are constructed; at that time, 76 cases were known.

The ACF released a statement saying that Vladimir Putin bears responsibility for the repression and that the evidence in these cases is unsubstantiated. The foundation added that it had warned a “significant number of potential targets” and that “several people were successfully evacuated”.

In early September, ACF director Ivan Zhdanov announced his departure from the organisation. In an interview following his exit, he described the decision to launch a donation drive after the ban as “imprudent”. “Risky decisions were made, which the Putin regime ultimately exploited”, Zhdanov said.