PROFILE: Alexander Kynev counted votes, the charge speaks only of drugs

The channel goes quiet

September 23, one morning

Since September 23, Alexander Kynev’s channel has said nothing.

His last post opens like all the others, with a notice in capital letters: this content was produced or distributed by the foreign agent Kynev Alexander Vladimirovich.

Then a few lines, and a question mark.

He passes along a report from the outlet RBC: Vyacheslav Volodin would stay on as speaker of the Duma. He adds a tally. Head of the Central Election Commission, third term. Speaker of the Duma, third. Mayor of Moscow, fourth.

Then he asks whether that stability comes from fear of upsetting the balance, or from a bench that’s too thin.

Since then, nothing.

Nearly 20,000 subscribers

The channel has nearly 20,000 subscribers. Its description fits in two sentences: an independent analysis channel, supported only by its readers.

In the morning, a thumb slides across a screen, looks for what comes next, finds only yesterday’s question.

One text of his still appears. At 1:20 a.m. UTC on September 25, the online journal Russia Post publishes an article signed by Kynev on the rotation of Russia’s regional elites.

His name at the top of a page. His voice nowhere.

That same day, September 25, 2026, Moscow’s Perovsky district court orders him held in custody.

A question asked, then no more questions.

An asterisk

In the September 25 dispatches

In the Russian press on September 25, his name carries a star.

An asterisk at RIA Novosti, the state news agency. An asterisk at Fontanka, in Saint Petersburg. An asterisk that points, at the bottom of the page, to the Justice Ministry’s registry.

The star calls up a footnote. The footnote says he has been designated a foreign agent in Russia.

Kommersant doesn’t need a star: its headline introduces a political scientist declared a foreign agent first, and a man under arrest second.

A label he wore himself

He wore that label himself, post after post.

The law requires the notice. He put it before the Moscow numbers, before the results abroad, before his opinion pieces, before his last post.

He followed the rule to the end.

One detail, though, says the opposite of the star. Under the channel’s name, two bank card numbers, one at Sber, the other at VTB, both Russian banks. That’s how readers’ donations come in.

A foreign agent paid through Russian cards.

A star before the name. A footnote at the bottom. And, since the 25th, a charge that has nothing to do with the star.

The star speaks of politics. The charge speaks of something else.

What the court says

Perovsky, September 25

Mediazona found the case in the court’s database. The Perovsky district court remanded Kynev in pretrial detention on September 25.

The charge falls under Article 228.1 of the Russian Criminal Code, part 4, point g: illegal production, sale or shipment of narcotics on a large scale.

The sentence it carries ranges from 10 to 20 years in prison.

According to his lawyer, Mikhail Biryukov, he is accused more precisely of attempting a large-scale sale. He denies it. The defence will appeal, reports Fontanka, which gives the length of the detention ordered: two months.

RIA Novosti, the state agency, confirms the ruling and the article. Law enforcement had made no comment, according to The Moscow Times.

What we don’t know

Where was he picked up? When?

Meduza and Kommersant write that the date of the arrest remains unknown. Novaya Gazeta Europe puts it at September 24.

No other detail of the case is public. No seizure described. No quantity. No substance named.

On the 23rd, a question. On the 25th, a cell.

An article of the code, a sentence range, and silence all around.

Drugs, not elections

Not one political line

Read the charge again.

It contains neither the word election, nor the word Duma, nor the words foreign agent. It talks about narcotics.

And yet that is exactly what makes it so heavy.

A political charge brings people together. An ordinary criminal charge scatters them. People sign for an election analyst. They hesitate in front of a drug case.

Lists of political prisoners require political grounds. Article 228.1 carries none.

Published acts, in order

I don’t know what the file contains. Kynev is charged, not convicted, and remains so until judgment.

I judge what is documented: his published acts, in order, and the signed acts of the power around him.

Those acts fit on one page. It starts in 1996.

The charge talks about drugs. The archive talks about votes.

Thirty years of counting

From the Duma to Golos

He counted for the Duma first: from 1996 to 2000, he worked in the lower house’s staff, Kommersant recalled on February 20.

He counted for Yabloko next, as lead expert in charge of regional organizations, according to the same paper.

He counted for Golos, the voters’ rights movement: he ran its analysis department from 2006 to 2012.

He counted for the Committee of Civil Initiatives, as an expert, from 2012 to 2018.

He counted for students at the Higher School of Economics, where he worked in the 2010s, Fontanka writes.

A columnist until 2024

The Moscow Times adds a line from its archives: he wrote columns for it, until the paper was declared undesirable in Russia, in 2024.

Thirty years of tables, maps and districts. The trade of a ballot-box accountant. He is 51, according to Fontanka.

None of these jobs was hidden. All of them appear in Russian newspapers’ biographical notes.

In July 2025, in an analysis for the Re-Russia centre, he was still measuring turnover among regional elites: an average of 36% a year from 2016 to 2025, and 55% of regional heads brought in from elsewhere.

Percentages. Time periods. Names of regions.

Thirty years of counting, out loud.

December 2009

Five hundred pages

There is also a book.

On December 17, 2009, at the Carnegie Moscow Center, he presented a 500-page study of elections to Russia’s regional parliaments from 2003 to 2009, the website Caucasian Knot reported.

About 30 election experts in the room. Six years of regional votes put under the microscope.

What he was already writing

His 2009 argument came down to three findings, according to the same report.

The switch to party lists had done serious harm to citizens’ voting rights. Political competition had kept shrinking. Manipulation techniques had grown more refined.

He wrote that 17 years ago, in Moscow, with no star beside his name.

The method hasn’t changed since. Count. Compare. Publish.

In 2009, the same finding earned a book, not a registry.

February 20

Four grievances

On February 20, 2026, Russia’s Justice Ministry adds him to the registry of foreign agents.

His entry runs a few lines. It describes him as an election expert and a candidate of political science.

According to the ministry, he spread inaccurate information about the authorities’ decisions, their policies and Russia’s electoral system. According to the ministry, he took part in creating and spreading content by foreign agents. According to the ministry, he relayed content from organizations declared undesirable.

The entry adds one last line: he maintained ties with the Free Russia Forum, based in Lithuania.

That Friday, he isn’t alone. Meduza also reports the listing of journalist Vladimir Sevrinovsky.

The electoral system as a grievance

Stop on the first grievance.

The elections specialist is listed for what he said about the electoral system.

In other words, his profession became his offence.

That day, the star enters his name. It won’t leave it again.

On February 20, analysis became an official inaccuracy.

Staying

Against the war, in Moscow

Radio Svoboda recalls two facts that belong together. Kynev opposed Russia’s war against Ukraine. He chose to stay in Russia.

Until his arrest, he commented on political news on social media, according to the same broadcaster.

I attribute no motive to him. None of the public texts cited here explains that choice.

The price of an address

Staying, in Russia, means keeping an address. A door someone can knock on at dawn. A phone that can be seized.

And yet he posted several times a day, with the mandatory notice, under his real name.

A foreign agent who doesn’t leave. Who signs. Who counts.

Staying was already a signature.

The Duma election summer

July 2

Summer 2026 is the summer of the parliamentary elections. He spends it counting.

On July 2, The Moscow Times cites him three times in its election guide.

The Communist Party, in his view, has blurred its identity as an opposition party. It talks about the past when the public wants a vision of the future.

The LDPR is losing what made it distinct. It struggles to explain how it differs from the others.

A Just Russia has lost a large share of its regional voters, according to the experts he sides with on this point.

Parties, not slogans

None of these sentences is a call to action. They are diagnoses.

Authorized parties, weighed like products. Their brand. Their voters. Their wear and tear.

It’s a political scientist’s ordinary work, in any capital.

He weighed the parties. He asked nothing of them.

The last week

September 21

Let’s retrace his week, post by post.

On September 21, he takes part in a special broadcast on the election results by Redaktsia, Alexei Pivovarov’s channel, which is also labelled a foreign agent.

The same day, he shares the outlet Agentstvo’s numbers on the vote abroad. Across 18 polling stations in countries where Russians have emigrated in large numbers, United Russia wins fewer votes than one or two other parties.

In Barcelona, 5.56% for the ruling party. In Prague, 7.72%. In Helsinki, 14.21%.

He also passes along a local defeat for the ruling party, on the city council of Berdsk, in the Novosibirsk region: three seats out of 27.

September 22

On the 22nd, he shares, in three parts, another observer’s analysis of Moscow’s central district, where a Yabloko leader faced his former assistant.

These aren’t slogans. They’re tables.

Votes, percentages, spoiled ballots. The exact material the ministry has been calling, since February, inaccurate information about the electoral system.

A week of tables, not one line of slogan.

Four months alone

The September 22 message

On the evening of September 22, he writes to his readers.

He writes that he is very tired. He writes that he spent four months wearing himself out, alone, on heavy monitoring work. He writes that the work produced four reports made public, plus a huge number of interviews and comments.

He says he often served as a therapist for friends during this tense campaign, taking in stories that can’t be made public.

He writes that he isn’t made of iron.

He notes that nobody pays him for this, except his friends and his readers. He says he will write a little less for a while, to recharge.

The lecturers

This message isn’t a saint’s lament.

In it, he writes that he was insulted and harassed all campaign long, by trolls and by people lecturing him, because he refused to follow their circle. He vows never to deal with them. Along the way, he takes aim at a small party that calls itself democratic.

He adds that most people don’t want facts, only for you to agree with them.

That’s what I owe this profile, in fairness: Kynev was no camp’s hero. He also quarrelled with part of the opposition.

He signs off with a samurai maxim: no goal, only a path.

Not a hero. A tired man still counting.

District 203

Sixteen districts

On the morning of September 22, he posts the results for Moscow’s 16 single-member districts.

Names, parties, votes, percentages. And, for each one, the number of spoiled ballots.

District No. 195, Babushkinsky. No. 196, Kuntsevsky. And so on, down to No. 210, Solntsevsky.

Perovsky, twice

In the middle of the list sits No. 203. Perovsky.

The United Russia candidate comes first there with 43.75% of the vote, according to his table. Next line: 833 spoiled ballots.

On September 22, Perovsky is a line in his table.

On September 25, Perovsky is the name of the court that sends him to detention.

I read no message in it. It’s the name of a Moscow district, used for an electoral district and for a court. Nothing more.

But some coincidences describe a country. In three days, the man who counted one district’s votes stands before the judge of a district by the same name.

Three days.

On the 22nd, he counted Perovsky. By the 25th, Perovsky counted him.

June 2019

Up to 20 years, back then too

The pattern has a precedent, and it has a name: Ivan Golunov.

In June 2019, the investigative journalist is arrested in Moscow on drug charges. He faces up to 20 years in prison, The Moscow Times wrote.

He is released a few days later. The charges are dropped, after an unprecedented campaign of support.

Putin fires two senior police officials. In January 2020, five police officers are taken into custody.

May 28, 2021

On May 28, 2021, a Moscow court convicts the five former officers. 12 years for the man who led the operation. Eight years for three others. Five years for the one who cooperated.

The mephedrone and cocaine had been planted in his backpack and his apartment by the police unit, the same paper reported.

I’m not writing that the Kynev case is of that kind. I don’t know.

I’m writing that the pattern exists, that it has a date, and that a Russian court established it itself.

The precedent accuses no one. It forces us to look.

The incidents page

2019, a campaign

In 2019, the mobilization for Golunov brought together activists and Kremlin critics, The Moscow Times wrote two years later.

A name repeated everywhere. Pressure that finally opened a door.

2026, an asterisk

On September 25, 2026, Kommersant files Kynev’s arrest under its Incidents section. So does Moscow 24.

A political scientist, a star, a crime-brief column.

An ordinary criminal charge puts a man where nobody signs petitions.

And yet one voice spoke up on day one. Alexei Venediktov, of Echo of Moscow, let it be known that Kynev does not admit guilt, Mediazona reports.

His lawyer, quoted by Moscow 24, says the same: his client does not admit the attempted sale he is accused of.

One voice. One lawyer. Not yet a campaign.

In 2019, a campaign. In 2026, a crime brief.

Who will count

Two months

The detention ordered runs two months. The defence will appeal.

Two months is a season. On the 22nd, he wrote that he needed a bit of rest. Not like this.

Meanwhile, the channel stays frozen on a question about stability.

The star doesn’t move. It was there before the charge. Nothing in the public record says it will fade.

I’ll confess: what worries me most isn’t the verdict. It’s being forgotten. A drug charge is hard to remember, and a name nobody repeats fades fast.

A name nobody repeats

On the day of the trial, if the prosecution never says the word political, will his name still be on a single one of our lists?

Alexander Kynev. Political scientist. Charged, not convicted.

On September 23, he was still asking whether stability came from fear or from a thin bench.

He counted votes. Perovsky now counts his days in a cell.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• Mediazona — Kynev remanded by the Perovsky court, Article 228.1, September 25, 2026
• Russian Ministry of Justice — Kynev’s entry in the foreign agents registry, February 20, 2026
• Alexander Kynev — message to readers and last post on his channel, September 22 and 23, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• Kommersant — arrest of the political scientist and his years at Golos, September 25, 2026
• Fontanka — two months in custody and the alleged attempted sale, September 25, 2026
• The Moscow Times — police officers sentenced in the Golunov case, May 28, 2021