T-invariant publishes the latest press release in the Chronicle of the Persecution of Scientists series: No. 31, dated March 31, 2026.
Two more leading American universities – the University of California, Berkeley, and Tufts University – have been declared undesirable organizations. This has already caused alarm not only among scholars, but also among IT engineers. The situation is becoming increasingly complicated: developers are finding themselves in a zone of legal uncertainty.
The legal conflict concerns the BSD license, under which – or in connection with which – a vast amount of infrastructure software has been created. In its classic form, the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license requires documentation to retain a phrase such as: “This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley.” This includes the FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD operating systems. But it goes well beyond them: the BSD license and references to Berkeley are present in the TCP/IP protocol stack – in other words, the entire internet – and the RISC-V architecture was developed at Berkeley, an architecture actively used by Russian processor developers. Public repositories directly connected to the University of California, Berkeley, are hosted on GitHub and are also widely used by Russian developers.
In other words, complying with the license usually requires mentioning “University of California, Berkeley.” Potentially, a Russian court could treat this as “disseminating materials of an undesirable organization.” But if developers do not comply with the license and remove the Berkeley reference, the software automatically becomes pirated and, at the very least, can no longer be updated through official channels.
One might be tempted to ignore this and assume that Russian courts and prosecutors would not go to such absurd lengths, and would not search for “berkeley” in GitHub URLs or in files listing the licenses used. But there is the “case of the Yaroslavl admins,” which we covered in detail in Chronicle No. 30. Among them was the case of Yaroslav Repin, administrator of the website of K.D. Ushinsky Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University. The court found him guilty under Article 20.33 of the Russian Code of Administrative Offenses and fined him after a dissertation containing a link to Yale University – declared an “undesirable organization” in the summer of 2025 – was found in a repository on the university website.
In a comment related to Berkeley’s designation as an “undesirable organization,” Forbes quoted a lawyer: “There is, however, a principle of interpretation in jurisprudence known as the ‘argument from absurdity’ (argumentum ad absurdum),” Bulgakov noted. Its essence is that a version of a law’s meaning should not be accepted if it leads to absurd, illogical, or socially dangerous consequences. “Therefore, although further practice should certainly be monitored, mass problems for the IT industry due to the use of software or developments from undesirable organizations are unlikely to be expected right now,” he concluded.
The problem is that in Yaroslav Repin’s case, this principle was violated. When Repin and his defense attorney did not admit guilt and argued that Repin could not remove every link to “undesirable organizations” because he had no tools to do so, the judge rejected that explanation and issued a ruling: “Repin Y.V.’s references to the absence of a mechanism for identifying and removing such materials are untenable… [this] does not exempt a person from liability.”
In effect, the court violated a fundamental principle of law: Ad impossibilia nemo tenetur – “No one is obligated to do the impossible.” This is precisely the kind of “version of a law’s meaning” that leads to absurdity. Although the lawyer who commented for Forbes believes that “mass problems for the IT industry due to the use of software or developments from undesirable organizations are unlikely to be expected right now,” precedents already exist in the four cases involving the Yaroslavl admins. GitHub is a public library. A prosecutor does not need to understand code. It is enough to see the word “berkeley” in a URL and check it against the Justice Ministry’s list. If you are an administrator and your corporate portal contains a link reading, “Software build instructions (get it here: github.com/berkeley-…),” then you are a potential “Yaroslav Repin.”
Thus Russian developers are being pushed into a legal gray zone. Either they stay on the right side of Russian law but become pirates and lose their ties to the global community, or they take the risk of keeping licenses and links in place – and then all they can do is wait until a Russian court brings charges against them. No one knows which organization the Prosecutor General’s Office will declare “undesirable” tomorrow, or which links and licenses will suddenly have to be removed.
New Cards
March 31, 2026. Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office declared the activities of the private American Tufts University and the university’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy undesirable on Russian territory, RBC reports.
University of California, Berkeley
February 16, 2026. Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office declared the activities of the University of California, Berkeley, undesirable on Russian territory, RIA Novosti reports.
March 24, 2026. The Second Western District Military Court in Moscow sentenced Ivan Frolov, a research fellow at a Russian Academy of Sciences research center (the Federal Research Center of Problems of Chemical Physics and Medicinal Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences), to nine and a half years in prison for transferring 2,800 rubles to Artpodgotovka, an organization recognized in Russia as extremist and terrorist and banned there, RBC reports, citing the court’s press service.
March 13, 2026. Ekaterina Zhuravskaya was added to the foreign agents register. According to the Justice Ministry, Zhuravskaya disseminated false information about decisions made by the Russian authorities and their policies; opposed the special military operation in Ukraine; and took part in creating and disseminating materials and messages by foreign agents and organizations deemed undesirable in the Russian Federation.
January 14, 2026. Alexei Dudarev was detained on his way to work on January 14, 2026, and his apartment was searched. The court placed him in custody. The case became known only on February 6, Radio Liberty reports. Dudarev was arrested and charged with high treason, T-invariant reports.
Updates
March 11, 2026. Russia’s Supreme Court found no grounds to overturn the sentence of a Kazan resident who had posted comments online calling for terrorist activity. Lower courts sentenced Andrei Boyarshinov to five years in a general-regime penal colony, according to the Supreme Court’s channel.
Ekaterina Shulman
March 2, 2026. A Moscow judge sentenced political scientist Ekaterina Shulman to one year in a penal colony in a case involving evasion of the duties of a foreign agent, a RIA Novosti correspondent reported from the courtroom. The case was heard in absentia by a magistrate judge of Moscow’s Meshchansky district, judicial district No. 384. During closing arguments, the prosecution requested one year and eleven months in a penal colony and a three-year ban on administering websites. Shulman is accused of evading duties provided for by Russian legislation on foreign agents (Part 2 of Article 330.1 of the Russian Criminal Code). She has been arrested in absentia.
January 16, 2026. The Kirovsky District Court of Yaroslavl found Evgeny Ermolin guilty of participating in the activities of an undesirable organization (Article 20.33 of the Russian Code of Administrative Offenses). According to the press service of the regional court, as reported by Kommersant-Yaroslavl, Ermolin was fined 5,000 rubles.