Russian journalist jailed over €3 donation to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation

A court in central Russia’s Ryazan region has placed a journalist in pretrial detention for a month over an alleged 300-ruble (€3) donation he made to late Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) in 2021, Russian human rights group OVD-Info reported on Thursday.

Alexander Moiseyuk, the former editor-in-chief of Ryazan-based media outlet YA62.ru, was detained at his home on Tuesday morning and is now under investigation for financing extremist activities, OVD-Info said. He will remain in pretrial detention in Ryazan until 16 April.

This is not Moiseyuk’s first run-in with the law, however. Last year, while still working as editor-in-chief of YA62.ru, he was fined for two stories published by the outlet, one of which reported on calls being made from the city’s military enlistment office warning residents that call up papers were about to be issued, and another about a fire that had broken out at a local power plant. A court ruled that in both cases YA62.ru had knowingly spread false information about the Russian military.

The FBK was founded in 2011 and made a name for itself by publishing fearless investigations into high-level corruption in the Russian government, including landmark reporting on the unprecedented corruption schemes connected to former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in 2017, which led to mass protests across the country.

In 2021, the FBK was officially deemed an “extremist organisation”, having released damning investigations into the FSB poisoning of its founder Alexey Navalny and an exposé of Vladimir Putin’s vast Black Sea palace, both of which were watched by tens of millions of people.

Criminal charges against those who donated to the organisation have increased sixtyfold since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported in December.

In 2025, the FBK publicly condemned the growing number of prosecutions of its supporters in Russia, stressing that it had never engaged “in any criminal activity” and describing those charged as “victims of outright arbitrariness and political repression”.