Day 15 of Oleg Roldugin's detention at the Petrovka 38 temporary detention facility in central Moscow. Sixteen days remain before his May 10 remand hearing, at which a Moscow court will decide whether to extend the investigative custody that began April 9 when security forces raided Novaya Gazeta's Potapovsky Lane newsroom for 13 hours. [1][2][3] He is being held under Part 3 of Article 272.1 of the Criminal Code — "illegal access to computer information" committed by a group acting in prior conspiracy, punishable by up to six years. [2][4] It is the first time the statute has been used against a journalist for working with leaked information. [2]

The architecture of the case is visible. The criminal proceedings were opened on March 10, four weeks before the raid — a timing the Interior Ministry confirmed in its public statement. [1] The charge cites "contacts with Telegram bots" as evidence; after detention, police gained access to Roldugin's phone and account, and investigators questioned him about a personal Telegram channel he ran containing what he described as material that "could not have been used in journalistic work." [3][5] Formal charges were filed on April 14 — the same statute the initial pretrial-detention hearing had already cited. [2][6] Roldugin, a co-founder of the now-shuttered independent weekly Sobesednik, has denied guilt and said he did not know which article prompted the case. [3]

The reporting the state is apparently pursuing is Roldugin's investigations for Novaya Gazeta into Ramzan Kadyrov's inner circle, the creators of Russia's state messaging app Max, and — separately — Viktor Yanukovych's Sochi mansion. [2] Each relied on leaked material; each has been cited by Novaya Gazeta Europe and the Insider as the probable subject of the charge sheet. [2][4] The Agentstvo outlet documented the statute's previous uses: only against administrators of leaked databases and against security personnel who leaked data themselves. [2] Roldugin is the first reporter. The legal theory is that a journalist who reports on leaked data is as culpable as the person who leaked it — a theory that, if upheld, converts the reporting act into the crime.

The structural gap is that Roldugin's Sobesednik tenure included published investigations into corruption in the presidential administration, which the CPJ cited April 9 as context. [1] Russian state media — RIA Novosti, the Interior Ministry's own channel — frames the raid as a personal-data-misuse investigation with no political content. The CPJ, Reuters, Meduza and Novaya Gazeta Europe frame it as targeted persecution. [1][7][5][4] The Agentstvo-level procedural coverage — documenting how the statute's use has changed — is the work only Russian-language independent outlets are still doing, from Riga, Berlin and Tbilisi, at increasing cost.

The May 10 hearing determines the immediate arithmetic. If the court extends custody, Roldugin remains at Petrovka 38 through at least early summer. If the court converts custody to trial, the statute's first use against a journalist produces a conviction the state will point to for the next case. The paper's press-freedom-wartime thread records both outcomes as acceleration. The question between Day 15 and Day 31 is not whether the state is testing Article 272.1 on journalism. That test has begun. The question is whether outside reporting can still name what it is.

-- KATYA VOLKOV, Moscow