Tyumen resident gets 15 years for treason after going to the FSB himself to report a crime

A Tyumen resident got 15 years in prison on treason charges after he went to the FSB himself to report a crime

In January 2024, 41-year-old Tyumen resident Sergei Lange received a Telegram message from an unknown number beginning with +380, which corresponds to Ukraine, with the logo of the “I Want to Live” project as the avatar.

Lange entered into a conversation. When the strangers sent a request to photograph a military unit in Tyumen, Lange immediately went to the local FSB office. He wanted “as a conscientious citizen to report everything”.

He was sure that scammers and saboteurs were writing to him, and he intended to help expose the criminals. At the FSB, he was advised to continue the conversation, stall for time, and wait until specialists contacted him.

As Vyorstka found out, a few months later it was not the scammers who were detained, but Lange himself. In the end, he was found guilty of committing high treason and sentenced to 15 years in a maximum-security penal colony, fined 100,000 rubles, and had his phone and flash drive confiscated.

According to Lange, the basis of the charges was what he himself showed the FSB when he brought them his phone and reported the correspondence with the unknown account. Before his arrest, Lange lived at his dacha, where he fed more than 30 cats every day. He does not know what happened to them.

Read in Vyorstka’s report how and for what reasons treason cases have been fabricated on a mass scale in Russia since 2022, and what made it possible to turn this into an assembly line (with VPN):

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