A damaged parcel, left unclaimed in a warehouse, turned out to hold a homemade bomb – and exposed a young Russian’s years-long entanglement with Moscow’s security service, and the wife he drew into it.
Ada Petriczko
The trail from the label led investigators to a supposed Russian dissident living in Poland as a student: named only as Igor R. under Polish privacy law, but who can be reported here as Igor Rogov.
Rogov was the one who had generated the shipping label, listing himself as both sender and recipient, at the request of a friend who told him the parcel held nothing more than gifts. That, at least, is what he told investigators. He denied knowing what the parcel actually held throughout the subsequent court case, but prosecutors argued the surrounding evidence – his contacts, his correspondence, his role in the shipment – showed otherwise.
By then, Rogov had already been living a second life for years.
That second life, according to the indictment shared with BIRN, started in the Russian city of Saransk after Rogov took part in a demonstration flying LGBT flags. Afterwards, a man he didn’t know approached him, gave his name, and told him he worked for the Federal Security Service (FSB) – the principal security agency of Russia and the main successor agency to the Soviet Union’s KGB. He had a proposal: he could help with the trouble Rogov was having at university, in exchange for cooperation. Rogov agreed, signed paperwork making it official, and was given a codename.
In public, Rogov was known as an activist, connected to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia movement. Behind the scenes, he was instructed by the FSB to write up what he saw there. His handler sent the reports back with corrections, prosecutors say, until they read as though someone in them “posed a threat”. He was issued a phone and SIM cards for contact, and later an apartment next to FSB headquarters. The money came quarterly, in rubles.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Rogov fled the country with his wife, Irina. The couple were granted visas to Poland because of their opposition activities and settled in Sosnowiec, a town in Poland’s Silesia region, where they enrolled in university on a government scholarship.
Between February and July 2022, he began compiling something more specific: details on Russian opposition activists living in Poland, some of them under international protection, along with information on the Poles helping them, including staff at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs running a scholarship program for Russian students critical of the Kremlin.
At his dormitory where he was living in Sosnowiec, he put it all on an encrypted USB drive. Sometime that summer, before his wife Irina flew home to visit family, he handed it to her. She was to send it on through a parcel locker in Russia. Asked later what happened to the drive itself, she said she couldn’t remember.
But Irina did remember, and later told investigators that she had known about her husband’s arrangement with Russian intelligence. As the marriage began to fall apart, she also told her friends that he was cooperating with the FSB. Polish prosecutors, separately, argued that the data on the flash drive itself was sensitive enough that its transfer could have caused real damage – undermining Poland’s ability to protect Russian citizens under its protection, and exposing people and procedures that depended on staying unidentified.
On July 9, 2026, the District Court in Sosnowiec convicted them both. Rogov was sentenced to four years for the explosive shipment and six for espionage, combined into a single seven-year term. Irina received three years for aiding espionage; the court lifted her pre-trial detention.
Neither verdict is final, and Rogov’s defence lawyer, Marta Smolka, said he plans to appeal.
The trial itself was closed to the public on national security grounds, so Smolka couldn’t discuss what happened inside the courtroom. What she could say was that she had hoped, from the start, that it would be held in public.
“Open justice is a fundamental procedural safeguard, and being deprived of it places us at a disadvantage,” she tells BIRN. “This isn’t just about the rights of the defendant. It’s also about the role of the media as the fourth estate. The ability of journalists to independently gather information and assess a case for themselves is a value in its own right. As things stand, the media know only two facts: that an indictment was filed and that a verdict has been delivered. Nothing more.”
