On Nov. 2, the Krasnodar Regional Court sentenced 65-year-old Russian and Moldovan citizen Natalia Slanovskaya to 14 years in a general-regime penal colony on charges of treason. According to a statement by the Krasnodar Region court system’s press service, the pensioner photographed a Russian Defense Ministry facility in February 2026 and sent the images to a representative of Moldovan counterintelligence. The court claimed that Moldova’s intelligence service was acting in the interests of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).
The court statement alleged that Slanovskaya opposed Russia’s war in Ukraine and secretly cooperated with the Main Counterintelligence Directorate of Moldova’s Security and Intelligence Service, more commonly known by its Romanian abbreviation SIS (Serviciul de Informații și Securitate).
Russian authorities said the photographs she provided could have been used by Ukraine to prepare sabotage operations and other actions against the Russian military. No evidence supporting that claim has been made public.
The Insider identified the convicted woman from a video taken at her sentencing, where the judge states her name and date of birth: Natalia Petrovna Slanovskaya, born March 21, 1961. Her name is redacted in the publicly available case file for criminal case No. 2-118/2026. Court records show the case reached the Krasnodar Regional Court on Aug. 24. The first hearing was held Sept. 14, and the sentence was handed down Nov. 2. The case was heard by Judge Vladimir Gorban.
The Insider found that Slanovskaya was born in the village of Gorodishche in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and lived in Moscow. According to a résumé found in open-source records, she worked as an economist at Progressive Biomedical Technologies and was seeking work as an economist or accountant. Available border-crossing records also show that she traveled to Moldova and Ukraine before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, including trips to Chișinău between 2014 and 2020.
It is not known whether Slanovskaya pleaded guilty. Authorities also have not disclosed when she was detained or what evidence of her alleged cooperation with Moldovan counterintelligence was presented to the court.
In June 2026, Moldovan authorities detained a Russian citizen at the border whom they identified as an officer of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Moldova’s SIS said he had planned to enter Transnistria posing as a tourist in order to collect information about the security zone along the Dniester River. The SIS also alleged that from 2017 to 2019 he had engaged in subversive activity in Moldova while using a Russian diplomatic passport.
In April 2026, Russia released two employees of Moldova’s Intelligence and Security Service who had been detained in Moscow in June 2025. They were returned as part of a multilateral exchange in which Moscow received Alexandru Bălan, a former deputy director of Moldova’s intelligence service who was accused of passing classified documents to the Belarusian KGB; Russian citizen Nina Popova, the wife of a Russian serviceman stationed in Transnistria; and Hermitage Museum employee Alexander Butyagin, who had been detained in Poland at Ukraine’s request. As part of the same exchange, Belarus released Polish journalist Andrzej Poczobut, who had been imprisoned since 2021.
