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on the cold In the year In the year On the afternoon of February 24, 2022—the day Vladimir Putin’s army began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine—a handful of Russian opposition politicians gathered in front of the Law, Order and Security Building in St. Petersburg. They had come to seek official permission to hold a demonstration against the war. They knew that this would not be denied. Among the group was Marina Matsapulina, the 30-year-old deputy chairwoman of Russia’s Libertarian Party. Matsapulina understands that the meeting is a symbolic sign – and will lead to serious dangers.
Nine days later, Matsapulina woke up around 7 a.m. to someone banging on her apartment door. She sneaks into the entrance but is too scared to look through the peephole and goes back to her bedroom. Matsapulina informed seven of her friends in a private Telegram group chat, waiting for her party, so the beating continued for two hours. She wrote with a wish:
But at 9:22 am, she heard a very loud noise. She had just enough time to lock her phone before the door came in. Eight men surround Matsapulina’s bed. These included two city police officers, a two-man SWAT team with guns and flashlights shining in her face, and two agents from either the Center for Combating Extremism or the Federal Security Service, or the FSB — the successor to the KGB, she recalls. . The officers told her to lie face down on the ground.
They told Matsapulina that she was suspected of sending a fake bomb threat email to the police station. But when she was taken to the Interior Ministry’s interrogation room, she says, a police officer asked her if she knew the real reason for her arrest. She assumed it was for her “political activism.” He shook his head, “Do you know how we knew you were home?” he asked.
“how is?”
She says the officer told her that detectives were monitoring her private Telegram chats when she wrote. “You were sitting there texting your friends in a chat room,” she recalls. He recited verbatim the many telegrams she had written from her bed. “‘And they cannot hinder him,'” he read.
“And,” he said, “we knew you were there.”
Matsapulina was silent. She tried to hide her shock, hoping to find out more about how they got her messages. But the officer did not elaborate.
When she was released two days later, Matsapulina learned from her lawyer that on the morning of her arrest, police searched the homes of about 80 people with links to the opposition and charged about 20 of each with terrorism charges related to the bomb threat. A few days later, Matsapulina packed her belongings and flew to Istanbul.
In April, after she made it safely to Armenia, Matsapulina reported the scene in a Twitter thread. She ruled out the possibility that anyone in her close-knit group might have cooperated with the security forces (they had all left Russia at the time), leaving two possible explanations for how the authorities read her private telegrams. One is that malware like NSO Group’s popular Pegasus tool was installed on her phone. From what she gathered, the expensive software was reserved for high-level targets and was not unleashed on a mid-level person in the unregistered party, which has about 1,000 members nationwide.
Another “interesting” explanation, she wrote, “is, I think, obvious to everyone.” Russians should have considered that Telegram, the anti-authoritarian app founded by the mercurial St. Petersburg native Pavel Durov, is now complying with the Kremlin’s legal demands.
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