Drugged and disappeared
A Russian man vanished in Uzbekistan, resurfaced in a Moscow jail, and was sentenced to 23 years. He says FSB officers injected him with an unknown substance.
Two years ago, Georgy Pirogov, a Russian man who had moved abroad after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, disappeared in Uzbekistan. He later resurfaced in a Moscow pre-trial detention centre. In July 2026, he was convicted of treason, and last week, the Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that the verdict had entered into force. The agency accused Pirogov of spying for Polish military intelligence and providing financial support to Ukraine’s military. According to the human rights group Department One, Pirogov says he was injected with an unknown substance before his removal from Uzbekistan. Novaya Gazeta Europe examines what we know about the case.
In early July, the Moscow City Court sentenced Georgy Pirogov to 23 years in prison followed by two more years of movement restrictions and a fine of 800,000 rubles (€8,100). Pirogov had left Russia via the United Arab Emirates after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and settled in Georgia, where he worked as an industrial climber before travelling to Uzbekistan for work. His relatives lost contact with him on 6 July 2024, and his abandoned car was later found in the Uzbek city of Nukus. Just two days later, on 8 July 2024, a Moscow district court sent him to pre-trial detention.
According to an FSB press release, Pirogov “independently established contact” in April 2022 with a representative of Polish military intelligence and was tasked with gathering classified information about advanced weapons systems used by Russian forces against Ukraine. Russian investigators allege he obtained data on missile systems, as well as personal details of individuals with access to state secrets, through defence industry contacts. Prosecutors also claim he transferred cryptocurrency to fund Ukraine’s military, purchased military equipment, and arranged its delivery from Poland to Ukraine.
Information about Pirogov’s life is hard to come by. Two videos of him are publicly available: one from 2024, filmed in Uzbekistan, in which he describes the harsh conditions of his work, and another, undated, that shows him after his arrest ”confirming” to FSB interrogators that he had gathered information.
Novaya Gazeta Europe reviewed the social media profiles of several of Pirogov’s relatives and found no political posts, aside from a petition his sister shared five years ago on Change.org concerning a small-scale land dispute near Moscow. Records from Georgia’s National Statistics Office indicate that, until 2024, a man named Georgy Pirogov served as director and co-owner of the Namaste Hostel in Tbilisi. The hostel’s Facebook and Instagram pages feature photos and videos of a man closely resembling the Pirogov convicted in Moscow, and the accounts stopped updating around the time of his disappearance, though the hostel itself continues to operate. Its representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
Novaya Europe found three documents connected to Pirogov’s case in a public legal database: two attempts by his lawyer to appeal his pre-trial detention order before the Moscow City Court, and a separate appeal against the seizure of his property. None of the motions succeeded.
Court documents show that Pirogov has elderly parents, holds a university degree, is unmarried, and had no prior criminal record. His lawyer said that Pirogov had “actively assisted in uncovering and investigating the crime” and had confessed, and that, contrary to the prosecution’s portrayal of him as a Polish spy stealing data for Ukraine’s armed forces, “no socially dangerous consequences” had resulted from his actions.
“The entire case behind the accusation [that he was working for Polish intelligence] was built on an FSB sting operation. Agents posed as one of his acquaintances and communicated with Pirogov under that person’s identity; the authorities later classified those exchanges as treason,” Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with Department One, told Novaya Gazeta Europe. He said it remains unknown to what extent the FSB coordinated Pirogov's abduction in Uzbekistan with the country's own security services.
“They took him the simplest way possible — FSB officers flew in, detained him, injected him with some substance, and brought him to Moscow,” Smirnov said, adding that this account came from Pirogov himself, who gave it to explain how he ended up back in Russia after his arrest. The account raises questions: the substance would presumably have been meant to make Pirogov compliant with his abductors' instructions, yet he would also have needed to appear sufficiently lucid to avoid arousing the suspicion of Uzbek border guards as he boarded the plane.
Smirnov noted that the charge brought against Pirogov has become commonplace in Russia. “[Charges of] treason in the form of espionage are extremely widespread right now — photographing military sites, sending data about military personnel, these things are now classified as treason,” he said.