Parents of ten teenagers held in Krasnodar’s pretrial detention center No. 1 over attacks on railway relay cabinets have published a petition asking authorities to reclassify the charges from a terrorist act to offenses involving property damage or damage to transport equipment. According to the families, the children did not intend to harm the state and were trying to earn money for personal needs.
As the outlet Veter reports, one of the defendants is 15-year-old Vadim. His mother, Margarita, says that on July 30, 2025, FSB officers and a television crew arrived at the family home in Krasnodar. The boy was brought there in handcuffs from a camp in Slavyansk-na-Kubani, where he had been learning kayaking. Footage of the detention was later used in documentaries aired by the Rossiya-1 TV channel.
Vadim’s family moved to Krasnodar from Kazakhstan in 2019. He was interested in mopeds, took part in collecting humanitarian aid for Russian soldiers, and looked for side jobs to buy spare parts. In a Telegram jobs channel, he found an offer to set fire to a relay cabinet for 25,000 rubles. His mother says he intended only to imitate a fire: he took gasoline, antifreeze and sand so he could record a short video and then immediately extinguish the flames.
According to Margarita, the teenagers poured antifreeze on the facility, lit dry grass nearby, filmed a six-to-eight-second video and then covered the area with sand. She says the case file includes an expert report confirming the presence of antifreeze and sand. Russian Railways assessed the damage at 1,149 rubles. Despite that, Vadim was charged under Part 2 of Article 205 of the Criminal Code as part of a group.
“They tell us: there was arson, so he is a terrorist,” Margarita says.
A similar case was opened against Timofey Slipchenko, who was detained after another fire on May 8, 2025. His mother, Natalya, says her son agreed to what he believed was temporary work and did not know it involved a relay cabinet. According to her, another teenager told him the target was out of service and was carrying a traumatic pistol. She says Timofey only filmed what happened.
The families insist these were not ideologically motivated attacks but cases in which minors were lured into crimes for money. They are asking for the children to be prosecuted according to the actual damage caused, rather than under an article carrying penalties from 10 years in prison to life imprisonment. Parents also complain about detention conditions, restrictions on visits and the inability to continue school properly while in custody.