Piotr Opalnik

A citizen of Ukraine, was also a citizen of the Russian Federation, lived in the city of Pestovo (Novgorod region). He worked as a manager for selling houses and was engaged in insurance. On 18 January 2023, he was detained on charges of confidential cooperation with foreigners. The reason was a conversation with his former stepson, who received a summons as a mobilised man: Opalnik offered him to surrender as a prisoner of war and gave him the contacts of his nephew who lived in Poland. As follows from the case file, the former stepson secretly recorded the conversations with Opalnik on the instructions of the FSB. Already after the agreement lawyers entered the case, the court refused to remove the public defender from the case. Opalnik received almost no letters in the pre-trial detention centre. During the trial, Opalnik spoke about torture. In July 2024, it became known that Opalnik was threatened with transfer to strict detention conditions (SUS) because he received the Prison Gazette, a samizdat for defendants in politically motivated cases. On 1 August 2024, Opalnik was sentenced to eight years in a high-security colony. In September 2025, Opalnik was stripped of his Russian citizenship.