About 800 people have now signed a petition<\/a> in support of Rozenfeld.<\/p>\n “Anyone who has ever met Sofya understands perfectly well that she in no way deserved what has happened to her. Anyone who has seen her, even for a few minutes, knows full well that she is someone who truly and wholeheartedly loves her country. Someone who consciously chose to live and work in Russia,” her friends, colleagues and supporters wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n According to Mediazona<\/a>, in spring 2026, Moscow courts began bringing cases of \u2018financing extremism\u2019 against employees of the Russian Academy of Sciences, one after another. The news outlet has documented six similar cases involving Academy researchers.\u00a0<\/p>\n In January this year, the FSB arrested Aleksei Dudarev<\/a>, another renowned researcher who had devoted his career to documenting changes in the Arctic environment. Dudarev, who worked at the North-West Scientific Centre for Hygiene and Public Health in St Petersburg, is charged with espionage for allegedly providing information that, according to the FSB, “can be used by Norwegian intelligence”.<\/p>\n Like Rozenfeld, Dudarev took part in several international projects, including the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP).<\/p>\n Rozenfeld holds dual Russian and Israeli citizenship.<\/p>\n Her friends told Mediazona<\/a> that she was deeply devoted to her work.<\/p>\n “She would say, ‘There\u2019s work here, there are birds here, there\u2019s everything,\u2019” one of Rozenfeld\u2019s colleagues told the outlet on condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n “Of course, she had many international projects: she conducted bird censuses in Alaska and at wintering grounds in Greece, Bulgaria, France, Kazakhstan, South-East Asia and China. But her main area of work was our Russian Arctic. If she had left, that would have closed the door on her career there for good. She wanted to do science in Russia, and she achieved a great deal,”\u00a0Mediazona<\/a> quoted the colleague as saying.<\/p>\n She also actively opposed legislation loosening the ban on the killing of endangered species.<\/p>\n \n Sofya Rozenfeld on field work, tagging forest bean goose, in Krasnoselkup area in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/460900.webp\")
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\n Photo: savesofia.ru\n <\/p>\n