Two admins of Russian rail-photo site detained, facing up to ten years for alleged critical-infrastructure breach

A Moscow district court ordered the arrest of Denis Yeskov and Anatoly Nagornov, the operators of the railway-photography portal RailGallery, on accusations of illegally obtaining and publishing a trade secret from a Russian critical-information facility. Under the criminal code provision for unlawful interference with critical infrastructure, the alleged offense carries a prison term of five to ten years. Prosecutors claim the duo accessed the confidential material, copied it, and posted it on their site, prompting the platform’s shutdown after a Telegram channel flagged the outage on October 15.

The site’s editorial board issued a statement expressing confusion and concern over the unexpected arrests. RailGallery, created in 2022 to preserve the archive of the defunct TrainPix site, had quickly grown to host hundreds of thousands of photographs and detailed data on railway equipment. The incident underscores Russia’s expanding legal reach into digital hobbyist communities and its strict enforcement of information-security laws.