A Moscow court has sentenced a 60-year-old member of the Liberal Yabloko party to four years in a penal colony for seven donations, totalling 3,500 roubles (€37), to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF).
The Simonovsky district court found Elena Perepelitsa guilty of financing extremist activity under article 282.3 of the Russian criminal code, state agency TASS and the Moscow courts’ press service reported on October 8.
Investigators said she took out a monthly subscription on August 5, 2021 and made seven transfers of 500 roubles each, running into February 2022.
The court ordered the 3,500 roubles confiscated, along with a mobile phone, Kommersant reported.
Perepelitsa admitted the transfers and denied the motive, telling the court she had not known of the foundation’s extremist designation and that she had supported Yabloko rather than the ACF.
Her lawyer Olga Pelsh said she had pleaded guilty only in part.
In a statement published by Yabloko she denied knowingly financing extremist activity.
The ACF, founded by the late opposition leader, is designated in Russia as a foreign agent and banned as extremist, a ruling handed down in June 2021. Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024.
Russia’s Supreme Court has barred the liberal Yabloko party from contesting September’s parliamentary elections, removing the only officially registered party that openly opposes Moscow’s war in Ukraine from the ballot. https://t.co/NuwatJhjhG
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) August 11, 2026
Perepelitsa has been a Yabloko member since 2017, has worked as a psychologist and on Moscow election commissions and has stood for a municipal seat, the party and independent outlets reported. She was detained on July 2 and has been held in pre-trial detention since.
The sentence is the third against a Yabloko figure in less than four months.
Deputy chairman Maxim Kruglov was jailed for seven years on June 24 for spreading “lies” about the army in two posts about the killings in Bucha, near Kyiv, in 2022.
Deputy chairman Lev Shlosberg was given 11 years and one month on August 17 by a court in Pskov, northwest Russia, for discrediting the armed forces after condemning the war in Ukraine and for spreading false information about it.
On the same day the Supreme Court upheld the removal of the party, which opposes the war, from September’s parliamentary election.
The Insider, counting rights-group data and published judgments, said at least 219 people have been convicted over donations to the foundation, and that Perepelitsa’s term is the longest known real sentence imposed on a woman in such a case. Independent outlet Mediazona counted 225 criminal cases over donations to the ACF across 64 regions of Russia by April this year.
On October 7, the same outlets reported, a Moscow court gave the Arctic-birds scientist Sofia Rosenfeld three and a half years for two donations totalling 2,000 roubles. Rosenfeld, a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences, was taken into custody in the courtroom.
Russian court sentences a prominent opposition politician to over 11 years in prison for criticising the war in Ukraine, as the Supreme Court upholds a ban on his party contesting September’s elections. https://t.co/3DGLiUJj3Q
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) August 18, 2026
