The case of Sergey Lange is not entirely representative of persecution specifically for words or beliefs, but it is highly revealing in another respect — it shows how the system is motivated and how far it has descended into moral and legal degradation.
Sergey Lange is a resident of Tyumen. Before his arrest, he worked as a taxi driver and had previously repaired computers. Available sources contain no information indicating that he was a prominent political activist or publicly involved in anti-war activities.
In the winter of 2024, an unknown person contacted Lange on Telegram from a Ukrainian +380 number; the profile picture displayed the logo of the Ukrainian project “I Want to Live” (“Khochu Zhit”). A few days later, the person offered him money to photograph a military unit in Tyumen.
Lange, acting as a law-abiding citizen and patriot — it is difficult to avoid a certain irony here — did not rush to carry out the assignment. According to him, he went to the FSB himself and showed its officers his phone and the entire correspondence. He explained that he wanted to report a suspicious contact and possible activity by fraudsters or saboteurs.
This is where the most interesting part begins. According to Lange, the FSB did not tell him to stop communicating. On the contrary, he was advised to continue the correspondence, stall for time and wait for further instructions from the officers. In other words, a man who had voluntarily come to report a potential crime continued the contact with the FSB’s knowledge.
Several months later, on 30 May 2024, Lange himself was arrested.
The prosecution’s version was directly opposite to his account. Investigators claimed that Lange had himself initiated contact with Ukrainian intelligence services, collected and transmitted information about military facilities, the locations of checkpoints and surveillance cameras, and photographed vehicles near a military unit.
This creates the central contradiction in the case: according to Lange, a significant part of the material later used against him consisted precisely of the correspondence and information that he himself had voluntarily brought to the FSB. No confirmation of his initial approach to the FSB or of the instructions allegedly given to him by its officers appears in the publicly available case materials.
Lange was eventually convicted of high treason under Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code and sentenced to 15 years in a strict-regime penal colony, as well as a fine of 100,000 rubles. His phone and USB drive were confiscated. After the sentence entered into force, he was sent to serve his term in Penal Colony No. 8 in Labytnangi, far from Tyumen.
This story exposes several serious defects of the system at once.
The first is the notorious “quota-driven system”, in which obtaining another “solved case” becomes more important than actually preventing a crime. But this system took root in Russia not only because of bureaucratic reporting requirements. Where law-enforcement officers themselves are embedded in corrupt schemes, provide protection to criminal businesses or even become participants in them — something that has been particularly visible in cases involving drugs — genuine crime-fighting begins to conflict with their own interests. Destroying a source of income is unprofitable, while clearance-rate targets still have to be met. It therefore becomes far more convenient to manufacture separate “quota cases”, including by drawing in people who previously had nothing to do with the relevant “criminal activity”.
The alleged recruitment of Lange itself looks particularly strange. He was not a prominent political activist, was not involved in military issues and had never publicly demonstrated any desire to assist Ukraine. Yet an unknown person using Ukrainian symbols suddenly approached an ordinary taxi driver and former computer repairman and offered him money for information about a military unit. According to the court’s version, Lange ultimately received bitcoins equivalent to approximately 100 US dollars for the information he transmitted. The amount is so impressive that one inevitably has to ask: either Ukrainian intelligence was experiencing serious budget cuts, or this was an entirely different kind of operation. In any event, the result was wildly disproportionate to the scale of the alleged “reward”: roughly 100 dollars turned into 15 years in a strict-regime colony.
Such methods, of course, do not necessarily arise solely for statistical purposes. In one case, there may be a specific “order” targeting a particular person, and the required evidence can then emerge around an already selected defendant. In another, those carrying out the operation receive carte blanche from their superiors and an effective guarantee of impunity. In one case drugs are planted, in another weapons, and in a third the evidentiary record is manufactured or artificially supplemented.
A revealing example is the case of journalist Ivan Golunov. In June 2019, police officers planted drugs on him and attempted to charge him with drug dealing. The fabrication quickly began to collapse: forensic examinations did not support the police version, photographs published by the Interior Ministry turned out not to have been taken in Golunov’s apartment, and the case triggered enormous public and journalistic outrage. Just 5 days later, the prosecution was terminated, and later five police officers involved in the fabrication themselves received prison sentences. But Golunov’s case was exceptional and virtually unprecedented for the Russian justice system: he was saved by a rare combination of obvious fabrication, enormous public attention and powerful journalistic solidarity. Such operations usually end very differently — especially today, when security agencies are largely insulated from public oversight and public condemnation has increasingly little ability to influence the outcome of a criminal case. The Golunov case therefore demonstrates an exception to the system rather than its ability to correct its own abuses.
This is precisely what makes Lange’s case so revealing. A person voluntarily approaches the state to report a suspicious contact, shows the correspondence and, according to him, follows the FSB’s recommendation to continue communicating — only for the very same story to later become evidence of high treason against him.
It may seem somewhat cruel to speak satirically about a man who, apparently, was far removed from politics and for that very reason did not understand what kind of system he was entering when he decided to seek the FSB’s help. But that is precisely the tragedy of Lange’s story. He seems to have sincerely believed in a simple picture of the world: Ukrainians are the enemy, the FSB is on his side, therefore he should go to his own side and warn them of a threat.
In the end, it turned out that his most dangerous mistake was not replying to a person displaying a Ukrainian flag.
His most dangerous mistake was that he trusted the FSB.
And one cannot help recalling the old line: “And the friend suddenly turned out…” Only in Lange’s case, it was even worse: the institution he regarded as his protector ultimately proved far more dangerous to him than the supposed enemy.
Source: “If There Were No War” — https://enbv.org/person/sergey-lange/
Source: “Political Prisoners Support. Memorial” — https://memopzk.org/figurant/lange-sergej-yurevich/