Asya Sorshneva. Photo: Instagram
A court in the central Russian city of Vladimir has handed a violinist a 3.5-year suspended prison sentence for donations she made to the late opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Monday.
Asya Sorshneva was found guilty of financing an “extremist” organisation for seven transfers to the FBK with a total value of 3,500 rubles (€39) made between August 2021 and February 2022.
A renowned violinist who has won both Russian and international awards, Sorshneva pleaded guilty to the charges and was under house arrest prior to the verdict being announced.
Russian authorities outlawed the FBK as an “extremist” organisation in 2021, making donations to the organisation punishable by a maximum sentence of eight years behind bars.
Navalny’s team initially attempted to make such transactions invisible to Russian banks, before disabling donations from Russia following the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Notwithstanding, the first criminal cases linked to donations had begun to appear by the summer of 2022. Mediazona said in August that Russian security services had learned to identify donations even when the FBK was not explicitly mentioned in the transaction and that Russian courts had heard 25 such cases in 2024, with a further 34 were filed in the first half of 2025.
In a statement released in August, the FBK said that anyone prosecuted for making donations to the organisation was “a victim of blatant arbitrariness and mass political repression”, and vowed to provide the defendants with the necessary legal support.
In a further crackdown on Navalny-linked entities, Russia’s Supreme Court declared ACF Inc., the American legal arm of the FBK, a “terrorist organisation” on Thursday, prompting the FBK to respond that it was, if fact, “Vladimir Putin and his henchmen” who were terrorists, describing them as “the people who started a war and killed civilians and political opponents”.
