Government leaders
Russia’s trainspotters have spent years documenting the country’s railways. Amid the war, their hobby has put them in the crosshairs of the security services.
On October 14, a Moscow court ordered the arrest of Denis Eskov, 35, and Anatoly Nagornov, 40, the administrators of RailGallery, a photo website devoted to railroads. According to investigators, they illegally accessed certain data and published it on RailGallery. What that information was has not been disclosed. Eskov and Nagornov face five to ten years in prison. Photographs of special trains — including Vladimir Putin’s armored train, the subject of a 2023 investigation by the Russian investigative outlet Dossier Center — have repeatedly appeared on RailGallery and other similar sites.