Who are they
The Sakhalin Environment Watch is an NGO established in 1995 to protect the island wildlife. Various volunteers, journalists, scientists, and businessmen were helping the NGO to carry out its mission.
In 2015, the organisation was already labelled as a “foreign agent”, but they managed to prove otherwise in courts (the case went all the way to the European Court of Human Rights). The ecologists, however, were not compensated in any way. The NGO was also left without any foreign financing correspondingly in 2015. Previously, they were getting exclusively private grants just like hundreds of Russian scientists, for instance.