Happy Monday!
I hope your weekend was filled with joy. I’ve spent the last week tinkering with the Russian Security Research Lab — and I’ve now connected all the main data sources, so some kind of progress is definitely being made!
This week, I want to look at the conviction of eight people for their involvement in the October 2022 attack on the Crimean bridge, and what issues it highlights both with terrorism cases in Russia and reporting on them.
With that in mind, here’s what you can expect this week:
- Eight convictions for the price of one
- An organised conspiracy or victims of circumstance?
- The challenges of an information-sparse environment
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Eight convictions for the price of one
Let’s start with the details of the case. The Kerch Strait Bridge was opened in 2018 to connect Russia with the annexed Crimean peninsula and it served as a symbol of Russia’s hold over the region and, at the time, a valuable logistics route (The New York Times, 2022). It is thus a prime target for attack and has been hit at least three times since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. One of these took place in October 2022 — the day after President Putin’s 70th birthday — and left the bridge severely damaged and five people dead, including the driver of the truck that allegedly carried the explosives.
Eight people were detained and prosecuted over the attack: two agricultural entrepreneurs from Kherson Oblast, Ukraine; two people connected to a company that owns a warehouse in Armavir, Krasnodar Kray; an Armenian truck driver living in Georgia; a fruit and veg supplier from Crimea; a logistics operator from St Petersburg, and a resident of Lipetsk who provided virtual sim cards to the perpetrators.
The prosecutors alleged that the eight were part of an organised group operating under the command of the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Vasyl Maliuk. They charged them with carrying out a terrorist attack, illegal possession of explosives, and, for two of them, smuggling explosives. The court agreed: All eight received life sentences, just as the prosecutors had demanded (BBC Russian Service, 2025).
An organised conspiracy or victims of circumstance?
The key claim made by prosecutors was that the group could not have not known that there were explosives in the truck, and they acted deliberately to carry out the attack. The defendants, by contrast, pleaded their innocence throughout. Their lawyers insisted that the prosecutors’ claims of knowledge of the attack were not proven, and that they cooperated with investigators at all times — including voluntarily arriving for questioning and paying for their own accommodation so as to be readily available to prosecutors (BBC Russian Service, 2023). On one account, therefore, we have a criminal conspiracy to weaken the Russian state and, on the other, people prosecuted for non-political, non-violent (if still illegal, if the aim was to avoid customs duties) activity. So which portrayal is accurate?
We can, of course, point to several characteristics of the Russian judicial system that are relevant to cases like this. Russia has a conviction rate of over 99%, which means that anyone who makes it to court is almost certain to be found guilty. Judges often simply copy-and-paste the charges of prosecutors — including blatant errors and inconsistencies — in issuing their verdicts. While the perversions of the judicial system are often exaggerated, the scholarship of Kathryn Hendley shows that, in cases where political interests are involved, the prerogatives of power takes precedence over justice. State security services also operate according to targets and, if there is pressure from above to solve a crime, there is a reasonable chance it will be — even if the solution doesn’t quite match the problem.
As such, the default analytic position that is perfectly justified in such cases is scepticism: Russian court verdicts simply cannot be taken at face value. The system is too politicised, professionalism too often lacking, and the playing field tilted too heavily towards the state.
There are also a few interesting details to this specific case that, at a minimum, raise questions about the verdict. Maliuk has admitted that the attack was an SBU operation and that those involved were smugglers who were deceived. While Maliuk could have his own motives for saying this — and prosecutors dismissed his comments as an attempt to mislead the investigation (BBC Russian Service, 2025) — it is consistent with the defendants’ claims and it is difficult to see how the prosecutors could disprove it. All of the defendants received similar sentences, despite different levels of involvement and for at least some prima facie plausible defences. The logistics operator in St Petersburg, for example, was not legally obliged to know anything about the contents of the truck, so the claim that he could not have not known about it seems more challenging to prove. Some of the key intermediaries involved were never identified by investigators, so even in the official account, there are gaps in the story.
The challenges of an information-sparse environment
The bigger issue, however, in adjudicating competing claims like this stems from the availability of evidence to analyse: When it comes to terrorism prosecutions in Russia, there is typically very little information to go on.
The trial took place behind closed doors, in a military court. This has been standard practice for terrorism cases for many years: In 2008, the State Duma adopted legislative amendments that abolished trial by jury for terrorism and other forms of violent crime (RFE/RL, 2008). The Russian courts have, in any case, become much less open since February 2022: It used to be possible to gain access to some court documents, but many are no longer publicly available.
The overwhelming majority of media coverage is restricted to the type of information provided by court press services. In cases that don’t become cause celebres, Western media coverage is typically based on newswires. Few Russian oulets don’t tend to invest much in investigative reporting around terrorism; they elaborate more on the technical details but do not add much to them, and otherwise rely on information provided by the security services.
In this case, the sole exception appears to have been coverage by BBC Russian Service, which says that it has reviewed documents from the trial, including transcripts from the defendants’ interrogations. This material provides plenty of grounds to question the verdict, but it is still incomplete: We lack a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence and the contradictions in the accounts presented. If submitted evidence were sufficient for deciding guilt, there would be no need for trials in any country.
One suspects that the case involved nothing more than convenient scapegoats engaged in relatively mundane activity, rather than criminal masterminds striking a major blow to Russia’s infrastructure and prestige. But the prosecutors can mark the case as successfully closed, and it will be added to the statistics regardless.
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