Exile, Espionage and a Bomb Plot: The Double Life of a Russian Opposition Activist in Poland

The police came for Igor Rogov because someone had mailed him a bomb-making kit. The eclectic mix of items – a chrome vacuum flask, a pair of marker pens, a power bank and a bottle of antifreeze fluid – might have seemed innocuous to an untrained eye, but Poland was on high alert in July 2024. Two months previously, a shopping mall in Warsaw had burned down in an arson attack; an Ikea in neighbouring Lithuania was also set on fire. Authorities believed it was a sabotage campaign masterminded by Russia’s intelligence services, intended to sow panic and undermine support for Ukraine. They feared it was only a matter of time before the Kremlin escalated further.

A security officer at the parcel company’s warehouse was suspicious enough about the package to call in the authorities, who arrived with sniffer dogs and special equipment. X-rays of the marker pens showed they had 1980s Soviet-produced detonators concealed inside, while the flask had a false bottom containing a sachet of metallic powder. The power bank appeared to have been tampered with in some way, and a probe of the bottled liquid showed it contained a highly volatile nitroglycerine solution. With the right expertise, the items could be turned into a powerful bomb.

Police ascertained that Rogov, the parcel’s addressee, was a 27-year-old Russian political activist, who in the past had campaigned for the opposition leader Alexei Navalny and other anti-Kremlin groups. He had fled Russia two years previously, fearing arrest for his activities, and been granted asylum in Poland. He won a scholarship to attend university in Sosnowiec, an industrial city in the south-west of the country. His wife, Irina Rogova, followed him to Poland and also enrolled at the university; the couple lived in a student dormitory. It was there that authorities arrested him.

Rogov’s phone, when searched, contained photographs of urban scenes in the vicinity of Sosnowiec overlaid with red arrows, apparently indicating places to hide or retrieve items. One photo was of a gas pipeline on the outskirts of town, an appealing potential target for a Russian bomb attack. The chance discovery of the package, it seemed, had led authorities to a participant, perhaps even a coordinator, of Russia’s sabotage campaign against Poland, living under deep cover as a brave opponent to the Kremlin.

More than a year later, in October 2025, Polish authorities revealed they were also accusing Rogov of longstanding collaboration with the FSB, Russia’s feared security service. This suggested that his whole career as an anti-Kremlin activist might have been a cover story for his FSB work. When the case came to court, however, the judge closed proceedings to the public and press on national security grounds, fuelling further speculation and rumours about what exactly Rogov had done – especially among Russia’s exiled political opposition, where infighting, suspicions and accusations are commonplace.

Although Rogov’s trial was closed, I discovered thousands of pages of documents about him and his wife in the court papers of a related case. (Some of the files were previously reported on by the Polish news site Wirtualna Polska). Those files, as well as interviews in several countries with intelligence sources and with those who knew Rogov, helped piece together a tale of exile and espionage that involved blackmail, deception and a marital crisis with dramatic consequences. (In accordance with Polish law, people mentioned in court files are identified in this story by first name only, except where they have given their consent to be interviewed and named in full. Rogov and his wife are named as they have already been widely identified as protagonists in the case.)

Many who knew Rogov were shocked by his arrest. They described their friend as likable, easy-going and somewhat hapless, and struggled to imagine him as a cunning superspy, or a bomb courier with a secret life blowing up European cities on behalf of Vladimir Putin. “This is a guy who once accidentally sent half-naked photos to the group chat,” said Milia Kashapova, who was Rogov’s campaign manager when he stood in city council elections back in Russia and worked with him at close quarters for several months. “It’s hard for me to believe that all that time he was playing a double game, that he didn’t once come unstuck. If he was really collaborating all along, well, then I’d have to say that Igor Rogov is a genius.”

At the beginning, the only thing Polish investigators had on Rogov was the fact that someone had mailed him the suspicious package. In his first jail interrogations, Rogov maintained it was all a big misunderstanding. He denied any knowledge of the package’s contents and insisted he would never have knowingly done anything to harm his new homeland. “I’m very grateful to Poland for taking me in and I’m ready to help you in any way I can,” he told investigators.

Rogov gave his version of how his name had come to be on the package. His friend Emil, also a Russian opposition activist, had told him that a contact was bringing a parcel from Ukraine and needed someone in Poland to leave it with. Emil said the package contained “presents from Ukraine” and Rogov said he would be fine to pick it up. Some days later he received a call from a woman who introduced herself as Kristina. “I’ve got a package for you from Diesel,” she told him, adding that she had just arrived in Kraków from Ukraine. Rogov had no idea who Diesel was, but assumed this was the package Emil had asked him about. He told Kristina he was away visiting friends, but gave her his address in Sosnowiec and explained how she could mail it to him using a courier service.

Polish authorities soon identified Kristina as a Ukrainian model from Odesa and put out an international arrest warrant for her. She was detained in late August at Amsterdam airport, just before boarding a plane to the US. Once delivered to Polish custody, she explained her side of the parcel story. “Diesel” was her old acquaintance – the nickname was because he worked with secondhand cars. He had found out she was planning to drive to Poland and asked if she might take a package with her. “He said he needed to distribute this stuff to poor people and was helping women and families,” Kristina told investigators. “I did think it was a weird set of things, but Diesel is a pretty weird guy.”

Kristina told investigators that Diesel had put the flask, power bank and other items in her Mercedes before she embarked on the long drive to Kraków. There, she had a rendezvous with a Czech businessman who had offered to pay her €3,000 if she would spend a week with him at a luxury hotel. She ate oysters and drank champagne with the Czech, though at night they retired to separate bedrooms, the case files suggest.

After she bade farewell to her new Czech friend, Kristina remembered the package. She was meant to hand it off in person, but when she called the number Diesel had given her, the man on the other end – Rogov – told her to send it via parcel courier instead. She retrieved the empty shoebox from a pair of €500 Golden Goose sneakers the Czech had bought her and filled the box with Diesel’s items. Then she wrapped it in paper and took the package to a bank of automated parcel lockers as instructed by Rogov.

Having addressed the package, she shoved it into a locker that was a shade too small, causing the packaging to tear. That damage meant the courier company opened the parcel when it reached their sorting facility, discovered the suspicious contents and raised the alarm. This set in train the arrests of Rogov and Kristina. Had she picked a larger locker, the package might have gone undetected and the bomb been assembled and detonated. But by whom? Rogov, or someone else? And on whose orders?

In the days after she sent the package, but before she was arrested, Kristina said she received a call from Diesel’s number. “I’m going to speak. You listen and stay quiet,” said a male voice she did not recognise. He told her the person she had mailed the package to had been detained, and that if she were also detained, she should invent a story about how she had come by the package. “All the correspondence between you and Diesel has been erased; don’t mention Diesel to anyone,” said the man.

The mysterious Diesel was emerging as the key to the parcel plot. Could he be a Russian agent working in Ukraine? Polish authorities had already arrested several Ukrainians recruited by Moscow to carry out arson in Poland, and it was possible that Diesel was part of a Russian sabotage ring with Rogov, using easy access to explosives in Ukraine to source the raw materials before they were assembled and detonated in Poland. Polish authorities issued an international arrest warrant for Diesel and one for Emil, who had told Rogov about the package.

Whoever Diesel was working for, one thing became clear as the questioning continued: Kristina knew nothing about the parcel’s purpose or final destination. In one of her interrogations, as investigators scrolled through her phone demanding ever more details of her encounters with various men in her contacts list, she lost her cool and asked them how this could possibly be relevant to the matter at hand. “All you’ve managed to achieve through your investigations is to prove that I’m a breaker of men’s hearts,” she told them.

Kristina was released in summer 2025, after a brief trial in which the prosecutor accepted that she had carried the items without realising they were dangerous and agreed to soften the charges. She was sentenced to time already served – 304 days – and fined. She did not respond to my requests for further comment.

As for Rogov, it was starting to look as if he, too, could be a tangential player in the bomb plot. He insisted he knew nothing of Diesel, and that the package had his name on it only because he had agreed to help out Emil. The biggest red flag suggesting he might be lying was the set of photographs of various urban scenes in Sosnowiec, marked with arrows, found on his phone. But he had a convincing explanation for that, too. He had sometimes ordered recreational drugs via a Telegram bot, he admitted, and would receive a photo of the pickup location with an arrow marking the drop spot. The only reason some of the locations were close to pipelines or other infrastructure was because these were desolate, empty places where hiding or retrieving a package would draw less attention, he said.

The investigation, which had initially seemed like it would uncover a major Kremlin terror plot against Europe, was not going to plan. There was no proven link to Russia, and the only two arrests were of a clueless Ukrainian model and a young Russian who was apparently guilty only of the occasional purchase of recreational drugs.

But something else was about to come to light about Rogov. Polish investigators were to learn that he had been credibly accused of working for the FSB for years, spying on his friends and colleagues in the Russian opposition. The source of the accusations made them hard to dismiss: it was Rogov’s wife, Irina.

Igor met Irina when they were teenagers. They were both studying veterinary medicine in Saransk, a drab city about 500km (310 miles) south-east of Moscow, where they lived their whole lives before emigrating. Rogov had a cheeky smile and easygoing demeanour that made him friends easily. He got into activism as a student, though to start with he was mostly drawn to local environmental issues. He was then one of thousands of young Russians who helped out with Navalny’s ill-fated attempt to stand against Putin in the 2018 presidential election, and he later became part of Open Russia, the opposition movement set up by the exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Rogov won respect in opposition circles after an incident in Minsk, in neighbouring Belarus, in August 2020, when Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin, declared victory after a rigged presidential election. Protesters took to the streets and Lukashenko launched a violent crackdown. Rogov was in Minsk as part of an informal monitoring mission organised by Open Russia. On the second evening of protests, Rogov and a fellow activist, Artem Vazhenkov, got caught up in an ambush outside a shopping mall. Black-clad riot police grabbed anyone they could lay their hands on and tossed them into armoured trucks; Rogov and Vazhenkov ended up at Minsk’s notorious Okrestina jail with hundreds of others. They were kept in a courtyard, hands tied and face-down on the ground, then moved to a packed cell holding about 40 men. “There was no attempt to get any information, like in Russian prisons. They just beat you for the hell of it,” Vazhenkov told me. The riot police broke Rogov’s ribs and fingers and left his body covered in bruises. The repeated kicks to his head in custody gave him migraines that recurred for years.

After three days of beatings, Rogov was released and deported to Russia. At the Open Russia office back in Moscow, he alternated between laughing and crying as he recounted the ordeal, still moving gingerly from the bruises. “We sent him to a holiday guesthouse for a couple of weeks to recover,” said Andrei Pivovarov, Open Russia’s executive director at the time.

A few weeks later, Igor and Irina, then 23 and 24 years old, got married in Saransk. Vazhenkov, who attended, said it was a “typical Russian wedding”, with vodka, toasts and lots of dancing. Rogov also became more active in Open Russia; the organisation felt partly responsible for the Minsk debacle and supported him to become the official head of their Saransk branch. But a few months later, Open Russia officially dissolved itself, because its designation as “undesirable” by Russian authorities meant activists could be arrested just for being linked to it. So when Rogov ran for a seat on Saransk’s city council in the summer of 2021, he stood as an independent candidate. Getting registered to stand, even in such a low-level vote, required organised and sustained campaigning. Milia Kashapova, a 26-year-old activist formerly associated with Open Russia, moved to Saransk for a few months to be his campaign manager.

The campaign was low-budget – Kashapova lived in the apartment of Rogov’s grandmother – but inventive. They spent long days canvassing on the streets and made Instagram reels featuring Igor and Irina’s cats. In the evenings they sat in bars, often with Irina, and discussed strategy. The police showed up at most public events to intimidate supporters, but this was standard practice in Russian regional politics, and Rogov ploughed on. He and his team went door-to-door, promising those who agreed to hear them out that, if elected, he would bring a breath of fresh air into the corrupt city council. In a campaign post on Telegram, he posted a picture of him and Irina with one of the cats, accompanied by the slogan: “Love and freedom.”