The Other St. Petersburg
How the F.S.B. bought an American protest movement for the price of a used car, and why a federal appeals court says the cure for covert influence is disclosure, not censorship. An expert commentary from Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec; the law and the record as of August 8, 2026.
At dawn on July 29, 2022, F.B.I. agents tossed flash-bang grenades into the offices of the Uhuru Movement in St. Petersburg, Florida, a city co-founded, in 1888, by a Russian émigré named Pyotr Dementyev, who Americanized himself into Peter Demens and named the place for his home town. History keeps a bookkeeper’s sense of irony. Omali Yeshitela, the movement’s eighty-year-old chairman and the founder of the African People’s Socialist Party, was led away in handcuffs in a city that bears the name of the imperial capital he stood accused of secretly serving.
Four years later, on August 5, 2026, the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in an opinion by its chief judge, William Pryor, unanimously upheld the convictions of Yeshitela and three fellow-activists for conspiring to act as agents of a foreign government without notifying the Attorney General (United States v. Romain, No. 24-14097). Read quickly, the case looks like a prosecution for holding the wrong opinions. Read closely, it is a prosecution for something else entirely: for concealing a principal. That distinction, between what you say and whom you secretly answer to, deserves attention on both shores of the Atlantic, because both shores are presently legislating it.
The government’s account, now affirmed on appeal, begins with Aleksandr Ionov, a Moscow entrepreneur of grievance who ran an outfit called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia and who was, the trial established, an asset of the Federal Security Service. His case officer was Yegor Popov; supervision fell to Aleksei Sukhodolov, of the F.S.B. directorate charged with protecting the constitutional order. (An investigation by RFE/RL later identified two more officers on the account, Yevgeny Vistoropsky and Aleksei Mityagin.) In May, 2015, Ionov invited Yeshitela to Moscow, expenses paid, and the coöperation ripened with unusual speed. That July, Ionov instructed Penny Hess, a longtime party officer, to draft, “ASAP,” a petition to the United Nations accusing the United States of genocide against African people; he specified the deadline and the venues for posting it. In September, Yeshitela flew to a Moscow conference called Dialogue of Nations, financed, the British press reported at the time, by a foundation tied to Vladimir Putin. Back home, he told his members that Ionov’s movement was “an instrument of the Russian government,” and added, “That doesn’t bother us.”
In January, 2016, Ionov promised twelve thousand dollars for a four-city protest tour; roughly seven thousand arrived, in two wires of $3,476.20 each. (The indictment renders these sums to the cent; the precision, as we will see, is the whole story.) Explaining the shortfall to colleagues, Yeshitela reached for the unsentimental idiom of a subcontractor: the Russians “have to justify the funds they receive,” hence the demands for reports, photographs, head counts. Over the following years the party published on request: a statement defending Russia’s Olympians after the doping scandal of 2016; a video of congratulations to the “Donetsk People’s Republic”; and, after February 24, 2022, when Ionov asked explicitly for support in “the information war unleashed by the West,” livestreams under the banner “A.P.S.P. stands with Putin,” plus pickets outside Meta’s offices, for which Ionov bought the plane tickets ($2,883.44) and drafted the slogans. When the Justice Department announced charges, his message to Popov was brief: trash the phones.
A superseding indictment in April, 2023, charged Yeshitela, Hess, and Jesse Nevel with acting as unregistered foreign agents under Section 951 of Title 18, a felony carrying up to ten years, and charged them, together with Augustus Romain and the three Russians, with conspiracy under Section 371, up to five. In September, 2024, a Tampa jury acquitted on the substantive count and convicted only of conspiracy. That December, Judge William Jung imposed sentences of probation: thirty-six months for the three party leaders, sixty for Romain, three hundred hours of community service apiece, no fines. The defendants’ speech, he observed from the bench, according to courtroom reports, was protected; the crime lay in the concealment. “Nobody is going to jail, nobody is going to pay a fine.” The leaders’ probation was terminated early, at the beginning of 2026, a milestone the party’s own newspaper announced with understandable satisfaction. Ionov, Popov, and Sukhodolov remain out of reach. The Treasury designated the two officers separately, in June, 2023; Ionov himself has sat on the sanctions list since July, 2022, and features in the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program.
Nothing about the method was new; only the paymaster’s initials had changed. As early as its Sixth Congress, in 1928, the Comintern directed American Communists to champion self-determination for a “Black Belt” republic in the South: the instruction was not to invent grievances but to harness real ones to someone else’s strategy. The campaign around the Scottsboro case, run from 1931 by the Comintern-linked International Labor Defense, displayed the full toolkit: adopt the cause, fund it, internationalize it, file reports. In December, 1951, the Civil Rights Congress, an organization in the party’s orbit, delivered to the U.N. a petition titled “We Charge Genocide.” Sixty-four years later, Ionov commissioned from Hess a petition of nearly identical burden, deadline “ASAP.” Rarely does history furnish so clean a footnote, and Ionov never hid the lineage; he spoke publicly of reviving the Comintern’s work with national-liberation movements.
The K.G.B. had a name for all this: active measures, aktivnye meropriyatiya. In the service lexicon preserved by the archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, these were operations to influence the political life and public opinion of other states, the province of Service A of the First Chief Directorate. The repertoire is abundantly documented. Before the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, the K.G.B. mailed forged Ku Klux Klan leaflets threatening African and Asian athletes, an episode recorded in the State Department’s reports on Soviet active measures. Operation INFEKTION implanted the claim that H.I.V. had escaped an American weapons lab, from a planted item in a Delhi paper in 1983 to Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1985. Mitrokhin’s notes describe schemes designed expressly to inflame American racial conflict. The continuity is not a metaphor; it is the same bureaucracy of incentives. Ionov, like his predecessors, had to account for every dollar, which is why he demanded links, photographs, attendance figures. Active measures are not hypnosis. They are accounting.
The psychology settles the arithmetic. Seven thousand dollars does not buy convictions; it buys the coördination of convictions already held: a calendar, logistics, the week’s talking points, and a reporting loop that turns a movement into a vendor. Small favors set off reciprocity and consistency; a shared enemy supplies the reasons. Which is precisely where the defense built its strongest case.
Under Eleventh Circuit precedent (United States v. Duran, 2010), the offense has three elements: acting within the United States, under the direction or control of a foreign government or official, without prior notice to the Attorney General. The statute forbids nothing but the silence. File the notice, and an agent may say and do whatever anyone else may.
The defense deserves its full hearing, because it is strong. The party’s views on colonialism and reparations predate Ionov by decades; agreement is not agency, and eagerly granting an ally’s requests is not subordination. The jury acquitted on the substantive count; the sentencing judge spoke of protected speech and imposed probation; and stretching the statutory word “direction” to cover any inspiration arriving from abroad would criminalize ordinary transnational fellowship, from diaspora federations to climate coalitions.
The court answered with a dictionary and a canon. Because the statute speaks of “direction or control,” the rule against surplusage requires that direction mean something less than control: it is enough to submit to guidance, without the employer-like dominion the Fourth Circuit described, for “control,” in United States v. Rafiekian (2021); the panel cited, approvingly, Judge Menashi’s dissent in United States v. Ullah (Second Circuit, 2026), which reads the word the same way. On that reading the record cohered: knowledge that the movement was “an instrument of the Russian government”; taskings met on deadline; reports filed; money received; and that unbothered shrug. As for the seeming paradox of an acquittal beside a conspiracy conviction, the court invoked Salinas v. United States (1997): conspiracy is a separate crime, complete whether or not the object offense ever occurs.
Nor did ignorance of the notice requirement help. Under settled circuit law (United States v. Campa, 2008; Duran), Section 951 is a general-intent crime: one need not know the statute to violate it, and the Supreme Court’s decisions in Rehaif (2019) and Ruan (2022), which construed different statutes, left that line standing; Feola (1975) still governs the conspiracy count. The Ionov chats came in as co-conspirator statements under Rule 801(d)(2)(E): reports to a principal are made in furtherance of the scheme, and the theory that the Russians privately wished the party ill does not convert handlers into provocateurs standing outside the conspiracy.
An assessment, with the confidence levels shown. That the holding is secure is certain. That reading “direction” as guidance is linguistically correct and systemically coherent is, in my view, equally so. That its capaciousness will demand self-restraint from prosecutors is probable rather than certain, and it is the part worth watching. The defense lost not because it was weak but because appellate review examines the evidence through the eyes of the side that won below.
Constitutionally, the case resolved on the test of United States v. O’Brien (1968), as refreshed last year by TikTok v. Garland (2025): a law that burdens expression but is content-neutral receives intermediate scrutiny, requiring an important interest unrelated to the suppression of speech and no broader burden than necessary. Section 951 never asks what the agent says or which cause he serves; it asks only whether he disclosed his dependence on a foreign power. The state’s interest in knowing who acts on its soil for a foreign government is perfectly indifferent to message, and the burden is a filing, after which everything may be said. In this the Uhuru case stands with Meese v. Keene (1987), where the label “political propaganda” banned nothing and marked provenance only. The defense’s precedents, De Jonge (1937) and Cohen (1971), involved punishment for content or for mere assembly; here the forbidden act is an omission, distinct from any message.
This is the hinge of the case, and the thesis of this essay: the liberal answer to covert influence is not to ban opinions but to compel the disclosure of principals. You may march beneath “A.P.S.P. stands with Putin.” You may not run F.S.B. taskings in the dark. Censorship punishes what is said; a notice regime punishes hiding for whom.
Honesty requires the other side of the ledger. The same instruments, in autocratic hands, become a club: Russia’s own foreign-agent law of 2012 exists to paralyze newsrooms and N.G.O.s, not to introduce them. And the irony here is of museum quality. Investigative reporters have established that Ionov, at home, worked the denunciation beat, petitioning to have independent outlets branded “inoagenty.” The man pursued in America for concealed agency was, in Russia, a wholesale supplier of the label. The civilizational argument reduces to two questions of design: does the duty fall on the actual executor of a foreign state’s instructions, or on anyone who ever took a foreign grant; and is the sanction disclosure, or stigma and exile from public life.
Note what prosecutors did not do: they did not charge under FARA, the registration act of 1938, which requires willfulness. They chose Section 951, a general-intent statute known in the literature as espionage lite, the same route taken in 2018 with Maria Butina, who pleaded to a Section 951 conspiracy, served eighteen months, and today sits in the Duma. The second-order consequences cut both ways. A low intent threshold makes real influence operations prosecutable; a capacious “direction” demands prosecutorial discipline, because every indictment of activists manufactures a martyr narrative the adversary will happily monetize, and the Uhuru indictment itself records Ionov arranging Russian media coverage of each action. The third-order adaptation is already under way: the charging papers describe crypto payments, layered intermediaries, and disguised transfers, the predictable answer to the detectability of bank wires.
Seen from Warsaw, where I practice, the American design looks almost minimalist. Poland has no FARA and no Section 951. What it has, since an amendment of August 17, 2023, is a rebuilt Article 130 of the Penal Code. Taking part in the activity of a foreign intelligence service against Poland now carries no less than five years. Taking part in a foreign service’s activity that is not aimed at Poland, conducted on Polish territory without the consent of the competent authority, carries six months to eight years: a functional cousin of the American rule, with consent where America requires notice. And a new Section 9 punishes disinformation, committed by a person taking part in or acting for a foreign intelligence service with the aim of causing serious disturbance in the state or of steering its organs, with no less than eight years.
The juxtaposition is instructive. The American statute hangs on the words “foreign government” and never reads your message; the Polish one hangs on the statutorily undefined term “foreign intelligence” and, in Section 9, on the purpose of the speech, which pulls criminal courts back into content after all. The American sanction can be symbolic, as the Uhuru probations show; the Polish one starts at eight years. One might say that the United States built a sunshine law with a criminal backstop, and Poland built a wartime criminal law with no sunshine layer: the first is accused of harassing activists, the second of missing the civilian influence machinery that only laborious proof can tie to “intelligence” in the strict sense. The diagnosis, at least, is on the record. A state commission under General Jarosław Stróżyk, created in May, 2024, described in its reports a long cognitive war waged by Russia and Belarus and a Polish response that had been ad hoc; the commission was dissolved by the Prime Minister at the end of July, 2025, its diagnosis left standing on the table.
The European Union is attempting the middle path. A draft directive on the transparency of interest representation carried out for third countries, the core of the Defense of Democracy package, would create registers and disclosure duties; the European Parliament adopted its negotiating position on November 27, 2025, by 392 votes to 88, with 133 abstentions, and sent the file into negotiations, stressing safeguards against the stigmatizing of lawful activity. The boundary was drawn earlier by the Court of Justice, which in Commission v. Hungary (2020) struck down Hungary’s foreign-funding transparency law precisely for its stigmatizing effect. The lesson is symmetrical with the American one: transparency yes, stigma no; the duty should attach to a real relationship of dependence, not to the passport of the money.
For businesses and organizations, the takeaways are unglamorous. If you accept foreign funding, be able to demonstrate decisional independence: who initiates, who approves. Audit your contracts for the language of tasking, because tasking is what proves direction: deadlines, reporting duties, attendance metrics, approval of content before publication. Sanctions screening is an obligation, not a courtesy; Ionov has been a listed party since July, 2022, and paying a listed party is its own, separate exposure. Crypto payments and fragmented transfers from unfamiliar foundations should switch on a lamp. And when in doubt, a legal opinion before the money arrives is cheaper than a defense after it.
The case closes in three sentences. Active measures are cheap by design: they purchase not convictions but direction over convictions already held, which is why seven thousand dollars sufficed and the state’s reply runs to millions. The American legal answer proved constitutionally elegant, because it punishes the concealment of a principal rather than the content of a message, which is how it survived the charge of censorship; its weak point is the capaciousness of “direction,” which after this ruling means guidance. Poland chose severity over sunlight; perhaps the coming directive will supply the missing layer, provided it can tell disclosure from branding. The Soviets knew that the cheapest weapon is another man’s conviction. The Eleventh Circuit has replied that the cheapest shield is disclosure. Which bookkeeping prevails, the next trials will show.
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec advises at the intersection of criminal law and national security: defense in espionage and disinformation proceedings under Article 130 of the Polish Penal Code, audits of cross-border funding and contracts for agency and sanctions risk, and representation of parties targeted by influence operations.
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
