Ruslan Leonidovich Karpuk, better known publicly as Ruslan Leviev, is the founder of Conflict Intelligence Team, an open-source investigation group specializing in military conflicts. He was born on August 22, 1986, in Bikin in Russia’s Khabarovsk region. After studying law and working in information technology, he became involved in online reporting and later established what became Conflict Intelligence Team.
CIT gained prominence for open-source investigations concerning the war in eastern Ukraine, Russia’s military involvement in Syria and, after February 2022, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Following the invasion, Leviev regularly appeared in joint war-analysis broadcasts with journalist Michael Nacke. Russian investigators opened a criminal case based in part on a March 2022 broadcast discussing the Russian airstrike on a hospital in Mariupol. Authorities accused Leviev of disseminating knowingly false information about the Russian armed forces under Part 2 of Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code.
The prosecution eventually cited several qualifying provisions of that article, including alleged fabrication of evidence, political hatred and acting as a group. On May 18, 2022, Moscow’s Basmanny District Court ordered Leviev’s arrest in absentia. He was already outside Russia.
On November 18, 2022, the Russian Justice Ministry designated him a “foreign agent.” In August 2023, the Prosecutor General’s Office declared Conflict Intelligence Team an “undesirable organization.”
On August 29, 2023, the Basmanny District Court sentenced Leviev and Nacke in absentia to 11 years in a general-regime penal colony and banned them from administering internet resources for five years. Leviev remains outside Russia and is not physically serving the sentence.