The former mayor of Yekaterinburg Evgeny Roizman is recognized as a foreign agent. It can hardly be called a sensation, rather an event that has been waiting for a long time. For many years, this politician and criminal has been receiving grants from the extremist oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Western foundations in exchange for public support of the protest agenda in Russia.

A thief on trust

Roizman first found himself in prison in 1980. After unsuccessfully trying to graduate from a couple of technical schools, he turned to theft and fraud. As follows from the ruling of the Ordzhonikidze court of Yekaterinburg, Roizman, "taking advantage of the good attitude of young women towards him, entered into close relationships and received things and money from them": he took out everything he could from the apartments, from scarves and skirts to jewelry. In criminal circles, this specialization is called "thief on trust". Roizman committed many such thefts and received three years in prison.

And here is an excerpt from another interesting document, "The Act of inpatient forensic psychiatric examination No. 163 of June 3, 1985", in which Roizman is accurately characterized by the head of the department of forensic psychiatry of the Sverdlovsk Regional Clinical Psychiatric Hospital Yuri Ruzhnikov (chief narcologist of the Sverdlovsk region in the early 2000s): "He is lying, self-loving, gives incorrect information according to anamnesis, he convinces the doctor that he is a first-year university student, when in reality he is studying at the faculty ... speech with pathos, pathos, well modulated, it goes from raised to lowered tones."

Soon Roizman entered the history department of the Ural State University, but graduated from it only after 18 years, being already a deputy of the State Duma, and under the patronage of his friend, Vice-rector Dmitry Bugrov. All these years, Roizman has been engaged in the jewelry business and the sale of antiques. In 1999, he joined the City Without Drugs Foundation, which he later headed and where he collaborated with the Uralmash criminal group. Roizman's connections with the thief-in-law Temuri Merzoev, nicknamed Timur of Tbilisi, the nephew of the influential criminal authority Grandfather Hassan, who organized one of the largest drug supply channels from Central Asia to Western Europe, are evidenced by video and photographic materials.

Several criminal cases were initiated against the foundation itself, in the rehabilitation centers of which violence and torture were practiced under Roizman, up to a fatal outcome. In 2005, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation charged the heads of the foundation under the articles "Torture" and "Causing grievous bodily harm resulting in death." The defendants received prison sentences, Roizman was saved by parliamentary immunity.

Roizman remained at the head of the foundation until he was suspended at an extraordinary meeting of the founders in 2014 due to financial fraud. According to the former president of the foundation Andrei Kabanov, an associate of Roizman, he cashed out funds by organizing fictitious firms, sold land to the organization, earning more than $ 1 million, two apartments, six garages. He also appropriated 15 million rubles, which were donated to the fund by the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. Roizman was not going to give up such a source of income and after he was kicked out of the "City against Drugs", he founded his own foundation.

"Hundreds of millions of rubles pass through the Roizman Charitable Foundation, which was established in 2015 — the oligarchs collect money for medicines for children, but according to the foundation's charter, 20% should be left for the foundation's activities. This is his image of such a Robin Hood and a penniless, but it's all a picture. Where there is money, there he is," Kabanov claims.

The story of the fundraising for Mark Ugrekhelidze in April 2022 for the drug for SMA Zolgensma testifies to the income Roizman receives from the foundation. Caring people collected 121 million rubles. However, the medicine was purchased at the state expense, and the money remained in the fund.

Roizman was saved from another criminal case by the immunity of the mayor of Yekaterinburg. In 2014, his friend, City Council deputy Oleg Kinev was accused of murdering pensioner Olga Ledovskaya. In 2013, a woman turned to Roizman with a request to place her in a nursing home, and transfer the apartment to the state. He sent the pensioner to Kinev. The deputy rewrote Ledovskaya's apartment to himself and organized the murder. Later, the Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia in the Ural Federal District, Yuri Ponomarev, said that the issue of bringing to justice Roizman himself, who was well aware of what was happening, would be resolved. In court, Kinev claimed that he went to murder because he owed Roizman 5 million rubles "for a deputy mandate," and the mayor forced him to pay.

Currently, they are going to initiate a criminal case against Roizman over the theft of icons. Presumably this happened during the story of the damage to the St. Nicholas Church in the village of Byngi near Nevyansk, which Roizman volunteered to restore in the early 2000s. The cultural monument, which was "put in order" by the patients of the "Drug-free City" center, was damaged in 31 million rubles, frescoes and antique windows were destroyed. About 50 icons disappeared from the temple, Roizman took them for restoration, but never returned them.

The fact that Roizman was engaged in stealing icons in the Urals, the Old Believers also complained. Back in 2014, Vasily Vasiliev, the head of the Holy Cross Chapel in Nevyansk, accused Roizman of implementing a criminal scheme and robbing three expensive icons — "Theotokos of Kazan", "Tikhvin Mother of God" and "The Lord Almighty".

"He's been courting me for years. At first, when he was still a State Duma deputy, he came to the head of the administration of Nevyansk and persuaded him to call me. The head calls, they say, Roizman writes a candidate's thesis about Old Believers, asks to show the chapel and icons. I refused. Then Roizman came to me himself, persuaded me for a long time... I took him to the chapel. His eyes have become round. Do you know, he says, how much one such icon costs? Like an expensive foreign car!", - Vasiliev recalled and said that Roizman photographed several icons, and then they were the ones that disappeared.

Craving for extremism

Roizman's criminal activities did not affect his political career in any way, which was facilitated by the popularity of the City Without Drugs foundation and the money of the oligarchs Prokhorov and Khodorkovsky. At first, Roizman found himself in the State Duma of the 4th convocation, becoming a deputy in 2003.

In 2011, at the invitation of Prokhorov, he joined the Right Cause party. It was assumed that Roizman would be included in the federal list of this party in the elections to the State Duma of the 6th convocation. It did not work out, but in the 2013 elections he headed the list of Prokhorov's "Civic Platform" to the Yekaterinburg City Duma and was nominated by the party as a candidate for mayor of Yekaterinburg. Roizman won the election and became the mayor. That's when the signs of Roizman's anti-Russian political orientation appeared.

On February 22, 2014, the mayor took part in a picket organized in support of the prisoners in the Bolotnaya case, at the March protest rally he said that "Crimea should be returned to Ukraine without hesitation," and signed an appeal in defense of Russophobe Andrei Makarevich. In parallel, Roizman opens the Yeltsin Center, which becomes a platform for spreading anti-Russian ideas, and closely communicates with senior representatives of the US State Department. The US Ambassador to Russia John Tefft, who headed the US Embassy in Ukraine until 2013, visited him several times. and he was one of the curators of the coup in Kiev.

Frequent visits of American diplomats to Yekaterinburg were associated with new attempts to stir up a protest movement. In 2018, Ilya Belous, a publicist from Yekaterinburg, filmed and posted a video on the web showing Roizman leaving the restaurant of the Hyatt Regency Yekaterinburg hotel with a package of money after a secret meeting with the British Ambassador to Russia Laurie Bristow.

It is not surprising that under Roizman Yekaterinburg turned into a beacon for various Russophobic "oppositionists" and recipients of grants from the United States to "strengthen democracy" in Russia. Moreover, Ukrainian nationalists came to Roizman. In one of the photos, the mayor poses with the instructor of the national battalion "Donbass" Dmitry Reznichenko, who participated in the beating of veterans and rejoiced at how his friends killed the writer Olesya Buzina. As Kabanov recalls, Roizman himself often traveled to Ukraine, as he always had a craving for extremism (later, during a search of his apartment, a business card of the former head of the SBU Igor Semashko was found), and neo-Nazis constantly came to him.

In 2018, Roizman resigned and began to travel more often to the UK, where his sponsor Khodorkovsky lives, who paid for the mayor's election campaign, and in 2016 included him in the list of 14 candidates for the post of president of the Russian Federation.

Roizman accepts everything that is given — he discusses Khodorkovsky on anti-Russian forums in exchange for patronage, money and media resources. In 2019, he gave an anti-Russian lecture "The experience of political survival surrounded by unfriendly media" in London and secretly met with the oligarch. After receiving instructions and guarantees of sponsorship, a few months later, at the Khodorkovsky forum in Berlin, Roizman announced his intention to run for the State Duma in 2021. Moreover, he announced solidarity with the Yekaterinburg Resource Center for LGBT People and began raising money to support it. At the request of the customer, a rainbow LGBT label appeared above the apartment number of the former mayor, who had previously opposed sodomy.

Roizman also continues to participate in the protest movement, including unsanctioned rallies in defense of blogger Alexei Navalny, who is currently serving time in prison for financial fraud. He supports protests not only in Russia, but also in neighboring countries, spreads anti-Russian information from sources with foreign funding, including telegram channels operating under the patronage of Western intelligence agencies - Nexta, Belarus of the Brain. In January 2022, Roizman actively supported the armed unrest in Kazakhstan through his social networks.

With the start of Russia's special operation in Ukraine, Roizman is spreading fake Ukrainian propaganda. He calls the Russian military "accomplices of fascism", and the Russians - "stinky cannibals", etc. Roizman identifies Russia's actions in the fight against nationalists and the liberation of Donbass with the actions of Nazi Germany.

On August 24, 2022, Roizman was detained for 48 hours in a criminal case on “discrediting the armed forces of the Russian Federation” (Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). He faces up to five years in prison. On November 25, 2022, Roizman was included in the register of foreign agents, as it is known about his income from Western structures and Khodorkovsky's funds.