Youth Victimized Twice

On January 26, Russia’s Military Court of Appeal upheld the sentence of five and a half years in prison for 15-year-old Bogdan Protazanov. Protozanov was convicted of setting fire to railway equipment, and the First Western District Military Court in St. Petersburg had found him guilty of vandalism (Article 214 of the Criminal Code) and terrorism (Part 1 of Article 205 of the Criminal Code).

On the eve of his appeal hearing, Bogdan’s father and coach recounted to Veter how a promising young athlete from a good family trusted scammers he met on a dating site – and spent nearly a year in pretrial detention on a particularly serious charge.

He Completed the Assignment

At around three o’clock in the afternoon on April 12, 2025, 14-year-old Bogdan Protazanov walked along the railway tracks near the station in Vyborg. He was carrying a three-liter canister of gasoline and a mobile phone. Bogdan was on a video call in Telegram with a man he believed to be an FSB officer. The “member of the security services” threatened to open a criminal case against the boy’s parents and send them to prison for life if the teenager disobeyed.

“I met a girl on a dating site.,” Bogdan said to the police officers who detained him the next day. “We started chatting – she wrote to me. It was in the morning. We talked for a bit, and then she asked me to send her my location. I did, and she said, ‘Yeah, that’s far.’ After that, about two hours passed. Then I started getting messages from the Interior Ministry. And then I started receiving calls from people who said they were FSB officers. They forced me to do what they told me.”

On April 15, the Transport Police Directorate of Russia’s Interior Ministry for the Northwestern Federal District published a video of the boy’s interrogation. In it, he nervously rubbed his palms.

At first, the phone scammers were only interested only in valuables. They told Bogdan to open the safe at his home, but he couldn’t find the keys. Then they moved on to bank cards: Bogdan transferred R180,000 rubles from his mother’s card to unknown accounts, along with his own R7,000 – money his father had given him for a trip to a sports competition. At the time, no one noticed anything strange about Bogdan’s behavior: both his mother and father were at work.

“Next, they told me to follow their instructions: to buy gasoline and set fire to a gray relay box on the railway tracks. And to show it on a video call – that I’d done it,” Bogdan explained.

The teenager approached a relay box, lit a small fire nearby, and immediately put it out. The only trace left on the railway equipment was soot. The whole operation lasted less than half an hour. As a final step, the scammers took a screenshot of the fire and asked Bogdan to spray-paint a flowerbed near the railway station.

Police arrived at the scene at 5:45 p.m. Bogdan’s father, Vadim Protazanov, said they were called by a boy who had noticed smoke from the fire.

Bogdan was identified within a few hours. The next morning at five a.m., riot police burst into his family’s apartment in Vyborg. During his interrogation, Bogdan explained everything and even recorded a video apology, promising never to do anything like this again. His remorse didn’t help; the video was later used against him.

Hot On the Trail

The Vyborg Railway Station is located in the city center. On the final stretch between Vyborg and Prigorodnaya, trains run very quietly. The tracks cross a bridge over the Gulf of Finland and, just 200 meters later, reach the terminal station. It’s easy to access this section of track through a hole in the fence near the Druzhba Hotel. Thousands of locals and tourists pass through the region every year: there’s a boat station nearby, the city embankment, and a bus terminal.

The relay cabinet at this section is responsible for heating up railway switches to prevent icing. Vadim Protazanov decided to inspect it himself. He followed the same route through the hole in the fence that his son had taken days earlier. He shares a video he filmed during the visit: the light-gray box on the tracks looks completely untouched.

“My son didn’t want to damage Russian Railways’ property or cause harm, so he staged the arson,” Protazanov told Veter. “A specialist invited to testify in court said the box wasn’t damaged and remained operational. If someone had really wanted to set it on fire, they would have bent back the lid and ignited it from the inside.”

Railway workers assessed the damage from the fire—scorched insulation on a heating cable – at R5,000. The vandalized flowerbed cost Bogdan’s parents R459 [in all, about $60].

“I paid for the damage. They cleaned everything off – it just needed solvent, that’s all,” Vadim continues.

Vadim Protazanov is a retired military officer who served 25 years in the border guards. He has two sons. He had dreamed of enrolling his younger son, Bogdan, in the FSB cadet corps in Pushkin.

“He would’ve made a good officer, but I guess it wasn’t meant to be,” Protazanov sighed.

He said his son is a patriot and never entertained thoughts of arson “with the aim of destabilizing government bodies or international organizations,” as stated in the criminal case.

Open and Responsive

Bogdan Protazanov was drawn to a sports career. He dreamed of making Russia’s national volleyball team. From the age of 12, he trained at the sport center. In 2023, he enrolled in Vyborg’s Favorit Sports School, and within three months made it onto the district team; a month later, he joined the Leningrad Region youth team. That year, Bogdan’s team was the best in the region.

Training an athlete of this level usually takes three to four years, said Bogdan’s coach, Igor Rukavishnikov. Success in volleyball requires not only physical ability, but good personal qualities as well: readiness to help one’s teammates, openness, and sociability. These traits helped Bogdan succeed. They also landed him in the defendant’s dock, the coach said.

“Everything that happened on April 12 was because of a coincidence of circumstances,” Rukavishnikov said, “and perhaps because of his open nature, which allowed bad people to take advantage of him.”

On the eve of his arrest, Bogdan was preparing for another competition. The Vyborg Championship Games are held every Sunday, and Bogdan hadn’t missed a single one.

Rukavishnikov – a gloomy man in his fifties with a cold, calm face –was one of the teachers who testified for Bogdan’s defense in court.

The fact that the scammers might have been connected to Ukraine did not come up in the court case. Nevertheless, the coach said he is convinced that the war lies at the root of Bogdan’s criminal case: without it, people wouldn’t live in constant fear of being accused of treason or harming their country.

“People are intimidated,” Rukavishnikov said, “told they’re working for another country, put into a kind of trance. A person is under psychological pressure from those on the other end of the phone. These people are posing as Ukrainian military intelligence and use the war as cover. With this war in Ukraine, so many lives have been shattered in such a short time – some have completely left this world.”

Deceived, Robbed, and Set Up

Bogdan’s recorded confession became the basis of his criminal case. His parents found a private lawyer only two weeks after his detention. In court, she insisted on a defense based on Article 51 of the Constitution, which allows defendants not to testify against themselves.

“Before that, there was a court-appointed lawyer… a real crook! Everything he did only made things worse,” Vadim recalled. “We filed for house arrest, and he didn’t even show up in court, though he was required to. Even the judge said she’d never seen anything like it.”

There were also no witnesses present at the hearings. The mysterious boy who had allegedly reported smoke from the fire testified via video link.

“He couldn’t really say what he’d seen. I think he was planted,” Vadim said.

Bogdan’s lawyer repeatedly tried to have his pretrial detention replaced with house arrest. Each time, Vadim said, “the judges would call someone and extend his time in the remand prison.”

Bogdan’s sentence was announced on October 15. The ruling was delivered by Judge Andrei Karnaukhov. This was not his first verdict under terrorism statutes. In 2024, he sentenced the artist Anastasia Dyudyaeva and her husband, Alexander Dotsenko, to three years in prison for “inciting terrorism” after they placed anti-war leaflets among products in a Lenta hypermarket.

“They just took him and jailed him without proving anything,” Vadim said. “The judge talked complete nonsense! He shut everyone up and reduced my wife to tears. He said that, because of Bogdan’s actions all the trains could have exploded. He decided that, even though a Russian Railways specialist told him that, even if the cabinet had been completely destroyed, there would have been no consequences. It’s auxiliary equipment.”

The criminal case also included the names of the scammers who called Bogdan. Vadim doesn’t know whether investigators managed to detain them or whether that affected Bogdan’s sentence.

“The scammers’ contacts are in the case file. They didn’t show them to me,” Vadim said. “What’s most interesting is that a criminal case against them was opened only seven months later, while my son was found in four hours. Instead of hunting real scammers, you jail children! Shame on our law enforcement system. I used to think we had a reasonable, honest judicial system. Now I know how wrong I was. After this, you really start wondering why I spent 25 years defending this country’s borders, when internal enemies sit in power and destroy our children, turning them into so-called terrorists.

“In April 2025, REN TV aired weekly segments about Bogdan. They twisted everything. It’s disgraceful. This is a child who was deceived, robbed, and set up.”

In June 2025, Bogdan Protazanov was added to Rosfinmonitoring’s watchdog list of terrorists and extremists. According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, some 300 people are added to the list every month, and one in ten of them is under 18.

According to Mediazona, Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Russians have carried out several hundred arson attacks upon the direction of phone scammers, In many cases, the perpetrators were teenagers. In December 2024, a court in St. Petersburg placed 16-year-old Arina Badyina under house arrest after she set fire to a police vehicle following a call from scammers.

In May 2023, four teenagers in Novosibirsk received an assignment via Telegram from unknown users to burn an out-of-service Su-24 aircraft in exchange for money. Investigators claimed the defendants were acting “in the interests of a Ukrainian terrorist organization.” In 2025, they were sentenced to prison terms ranging from five to seven and a half years.

Originally published on Veter.