The Leninsky District Court in Kemerovo fined a former employee of the Kemerovo Presidential Cadet School 50,000 rubles in a case over the unlawful storage and transfer of computer information. The charges stemmed from his sale of cadets’ photographs to parents, as first noted by Mediazona.
According to the case materials, the man was officially employed as a mechanic servicing equipment, but in practice worked as a photographer, even though that was not part of his formal duties. After leaving the school because of a heavy workload, he wrote to cadets’ parents on WhatsApp saying he could sell photo archives for 1,000 rubles per student, explaining that families valued memories of the years spent studying there.
A young woman then contacted him asking whether she could buy the archive for the 21st platoon. Believing she represented the parents’ committee, he set the price at 13,000 rubles, based on the number of children in the unit. After receiving the money, he sent her a Yandex Disk link. Some of the files were labeled with the children’s full names; the convicted man said this was done to avoid mistakes when preparing albums.
The ruling says the matter first reached school management after a senior instructor learned in early 2025 from cadets’ conversations that some parents had photographs, even though internal rules barred their distribution. After reporting this to superiors, school head Yury Gordeyev informed a military counterintelligence curator from the FSB, and Viktor Pavlenko, head of the agency’s department for the Central Military District, authorized an “operational experiment.”
The buyer acted on instructions from security officers, and the 13,000 rubles used to purchase the photographs were provided by the FSB.
In court, the witness said she had cooperated with the FSB voluntarily. The defendant and his lawyer argued that the officers’ actions were unlawful, but the court found no signs of provocation, stating that the man himself had offered to sell the photographs and the security service had merely acted on information already obtained.
The head of the parents’ committee testified that the school had previously provided families with cadets’ photographs free of charge. At the same time, the assistant head for security said cadets were photographed only for internal purposes and that such images could not be given to parents either for payment or for free. The defendant maintained that no such blanket ban existed: at parents’ request he could send group and portrait photographs free of charge without editing, or for a fee with editing, while only images from ceremonial school events were off limits. In addition to the fine, the court banned him for one year from working with computer information containing personal data. During the proceedings, he remained under a travel restriction order.