Russian customs official fired from her job over €28 donation to Anti-Corruption Foundation

A customs official in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg has been handed a 300,000 ruble (€3,460) fine and fired from her job over a 2400 ruble (€28) donation she made to the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, independent media outlet Mediazona reported on Tuesday.

The woman was detained at her workplace by Federal Security Service (FSB) and police officers on 20 November 2025, before being taken for interrogation, from which she returned late in the evening “in a state of distress”.

The official had worked for the Ural Customs Service for 15 years. Four days after her arrest, the customs service terminated her employment by asking her to submit a letter of resignation of her own accord.

According to prosecutors, the alleged donations happened over four years ago, between 5 August 2021 and 5 February 2022.

The Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) was designated an “extremist organisation” on 4 August 2021, making donations punishable by a maximum sentence of eight years in prison. Navalny’s team initially attempted to make the transactions invisible to Russian banks, before disabling all donations from Russia following the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The latest conviction is part of a growing number of prosecutions for historic donations made to the FBK, the vast majority of which occurred during the same six-month period in 2021–2022. In December 2025, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that prosecutions for donations to the FBK had jumped 60-fold since 2023, bringing the total number of cases to at least 123.

In February, a court in Ryazan imposed a month-long custodial sentence on a journalist over a single €3 donation he made to the FBK in late 2021. Three months earlier, an acclaimed violinist was given a 3.5-year suspended sentence for seven small donations to the FBK, again between August 2021 and February 2022.

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

Navalny, once Russia’s most prominent opposition politician, died in an Arctic penal colony, where he was being held on political charges, in February 2024. In early 2026, five European countries released a joint statement saying that multiple lab tests had confirmed Navalny was poisoned using an Ecuadorian tree frog toxin.