Moscow Court Jails HSE Professor 3.5 Years for Navalny Donations

May 26, 2026

A Moscow judge sentenced a mathematician at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) to 3.5 years in jail after he was found guilty of extremism, the exiled science outlet T-Invariant reported Tuesday.

Andrei Dymov was accused of “financing extremist activities” over donations totaling 3,500 rubles (less than $49) that he made to the late opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK).

Moscow’s Zyuzinsky District Court found Dymov guilty and handed down its verdict on Monday, less than a month after authorities pressed criminal charges against him on April 30. 

It was not immediately clear when Dymov was taken into police custody. A source familiar with the circumstances of Dymov’s prosecution told T-Invariant that he was arrested “about a month ago and purely for show,” with masked officers breaking down the door to his apartment. 

The exiled outlet Mediazona reported that Dymov had signed up for a recurring donation to FBK in August 2021, two months after a Moscow court declared it an “extremist” organization.  

Dymov is an associate professor at HSE and a senior research fellow at the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was named one of HSE’s top instructors in 2022, 2024 and 2025.

He is the second academic known to have been jailed for making donations to FBK. Earlier, physicist Yevgeny Onishchenko was sentenced to 1.5 years of correctional labor for the same offense.

Both Dymov and Onishchenko had signed an open letter by Russian academics against the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

According to T-Invariant, Dymov was sentenced in less than a month due to an unwritten directive to fast-track proceedings of around 16,000 active criminal cases tied to past FBK donations. The Moscow Times could not independently verify that claim.

Read more about: Court cases , University , FBK

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