A court in Poland has found a Russian opposition activist guilty of spying for Russian intelligence and taking part in a bombing plot.
Igor Rogov, who has lived in Poland since fleeing Russia in the wake of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, was convicted of espionage and “endangering life and well-being,” and sentenced to seven years in prison, Poland’s prosecutors said in a statement on Thursday. His wife, Irina Rogova, was sentenced to three years in prison as an accessory to spying.
Mr. Rogov, 29, was arrested in July 2024 after an explosives-filled parcel addressed to him was found in a warehouse in central Poland.
Almost a year before the arrest, after a heated argument with him, Ms. Rogova had group-texted their friends, saying that her husband had been spying on the opposition community in exile for the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic security agency.
Mr. Rogov, who had dabbled in opposition politics before moving to Poland on a student visa, later confided to friends that the F.S.B. had threatened to send his father to the war in Ukraine unless he cooperated.
The explosives-laden parcel found in the city of Lodz was never activated, but that same year, parcels at shipping hubs in Britain and Germany went off before they were loaded onto planes. Those episodes have been seen as part of broader Russian hybrid attacks against Europe.
During the trial, Mr. Rogov confessed to spying for the F.S.B. But he testified that he had no knowledge of the plot to put bombs on cargo planes, and he did not know the package addressed to him contained explosives.
Mr. Rogov’s lawyer was not immediately available for comment on the verdict and sentence.
Court proceedings in the case, in the southern Polish town of Sosnowiec, were held behind closed doors because of the sensitivity of the case. Before he was escorted into the courtroom at one of the hearings, Mr. Rogov was photographed holding a stack of documents and a small poster decrying the war in Ukraine.