Volunteers in a chat dedicated to letters to political prisoners reported the new case, which was flagged by the Support for Political Prisoners. Memorial project. According to their information, Ledkov has been transferred from penal colony IK-14 to pre-trial detention center SIZO-3 in Velsk.
On October 1, the Investigative Committee for the Arkhangelsk Region and the Nenets Autonomous Okrug reported opening a case for public justification of terrorism against a 33-year-old convict. The agency said that while communicating with other inmates at IK-14, the man "supported the ideology of terrorism and justified the carrying out of terrorist activity." The Investigative Committee noted that the suspect was convicted of crimes against the foundations of the constitutional order and the security of the state.
Konstantin Ledkov is in fact 33 years old, a coincidence that rights defenders noted. They also pointed out that on September 22 an asterisk appeared next to the librarian's surname in Rosfinmonitoring's registry of "terrorists and extremists," indicating an article of a "terrorist" nature. He had previously been listed there as an "extremist."
In 2025, the Naryan-Mar City Court sentenced Ledkov, who worked as a librarian in the Nenets village of Krasnoye, to five and a half years in a penal colony. He was found guilty of repeated "discrediting" of the Russian army, calls for activity against state security, and repeated display of banned symbols.
The grounds for the prosecution were a repost of the video "How Nazism Was Reincarnated in Russia," a link to an interview by Ukrainian blogger Volodymyr Zolkin with a Russian pilot who flew a Mi-8 helicopter to Ukraine, and the words "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!" spoken in a bar during a fight. Ledkov himself denies saying this.
According to Meduza, the publication of this interview was reported to the FSB by Grigory Zhdanov, 41, a mathematics and computer science teacher at Naryan-Mar College.
The librarian's father, folklorist Valery Ledkov, had earlier been a defendant in the case over financing the Anti-Corruption Foundation. In 2025 he was sentenced to three years in a penal colony, and the term was later replaced with a suspended sentence.