‘Urban Explorers’ and accused spies scour legal limbo in Albania

Striking photos of urban decay, including Soviet-era air raid shelters overgrown with weeds and the crumbling remains of factories across Eastern Europe, won a Russian photographer hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram excited to follow her travels.

But nowadays, the photographer, Svetlana Timofeyeva, 34, cannot travel much to satisfy fans of her exploits. Her passport has been confiscated by authorities in Albania, where she has spent much of the past year in a women’s prison on charges that have brought her a different kind of fame: that she is a Russian spy.

She has denied those allegations, saying geopolitical tensions resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have made her and her compatriots suspicious in the eyes of many Europeans – even those who, like her, have opposed the war.

“People don’t see Russians as victims of this government, but we do,” she said in a recent interview at a cafe in Tirana, the capital. “Everyone looks at you. Everyone looks at you suspiciously.”

Ms Timofeyeva and two other fellow “urban explorers” – Mikhail Zorin, a Russian student, and Fedir Alpatov, a Ukrainian – were arrested last August on suspicion of espionage after being caught outside an abandoned weapons factory in a remote part of Albania.

They say they were there to explore the plant and take pictures. They deny that they were spying.

But Mr Zorin has also admitted to pepper spraying the factory guards after they approached him, later saying during police questioning that he was a Russian agent. That confession, Mr. Zorin said in an interview, was coerced.

The three city explorers were held for nine months until a court ordered their release on May 25, although Mr. Zorin was placed under house arrest. They are now not allowed to leave Albania until charges are filed or charges are dropped.

That has forced them into a strange life in limbo in Tirana, where they share a two-bedroom apartment to save money, relying on the generosity of family and friends to keep them afloat financially.

Without her equipment, which has been confiscated by the authorities, Ms. Timofeyeva says she cannot earn money as she used to by shooting videos and photos for weddings and corporate events.

So she spends her days traveling around Albania with Mr. Alpatov, who declined to be interviewed for this article, in his orange Chevy Camaro, which he brought from Italy, where he lives, according to Ms. Timofeyeva. Sometimes they receive visitors from abroad.

The situation is strangest for Mr Zorin, 24, who had studied in Prague before setting off on a planned cycling trip to Greece, with Albania intended as a stopover to meet Ms Timofeyeva and Mr Alpatov. Locked in the apartment, he spends much of his time online chatting with friends.

“It’s pretty similar to becoming a cat,” he said of his existence, wearing a cat T-shirt during a reporter’s recent visit to the apartment. “You depend on people to bring you food.”

Mr. Zorin’s disassembled bicycle is stored in the apartment, and Mrs. Timofeyeva wryly pointed at it as proof of his innocence. (“Even Russian intelligence has more money to provide a car,” she said.)

According to Mr. Zorin, the group had chosen the abandoned weapons factory because it looked dilapidated, unaware that it was a military facility.

Separated from the others after they entered the factory, Mr. Zorin said he was approached by two men and did not realize they were security guards. When they grabbed him, he said, he panicked and used the pepper spray — which he had brought with him for emergencies on his solo bike ride — on them.

During a police interrogation, which Mr. Zorin said lasted into the early hours of the next day, officers accused him of being a Russian spy and did not believe he was merely an urban explorer. They threatened and beat him, he said, applying pressure to “pain points.”

Fearing that something worse might happen to him, he made up a story: that Russian intelligence had asked him to spy in Albania and said his family in Russia would suffer the consequences if he didn’t.

“I understand this was very foolish,” said Mr. Zorin.

But at the time, isolated and unable to contact family or friends, he believed declaring himself a spy was the best option, he said.

Those allegations were “completely untrue,” said Gentian Mullaj, a spokesman for the Albanian police, adding that the police had acted “in full compliance” with standard operating procedures and the “fundamental rights of citizens”.

The prosecutor, Kreshnik Ajazi, when asked for comment by The New York Times said it was the first time he had heard Mr Zorin’s claims and that suggestions that someone was targeted because he was Russian were “absurd” .

Mr Ajazi said the three defendants had been given their legal right to contact relatives when they were arrested, something Ms Timofeyeva disputes, and that a lawyer and a translator were present during questioning.

He said Mr Zorin’s statement remained confidential and that he was present at the interrogation of the three detainees on August 21, the day after their arrest. “I can assure you that there was no torture or violence of any kind,” said Mr. Ajax. He was not present when police first questioned Mr. Zorin after he was arrested.

Mr Ajazi said the guards at the factory had been in uniform and it would have been “quite obvious” to Mr Zorin that they were civil servants. He said, without giving details, Mr Zorin’s statement was not the only piece of evidence prosecutors had and that the group had visited other military sites in Albania.

Ms. Timofeyeva said the group had visited other sites in Albania, including a former military site, but they had never encountered any problems.

The electronic devices seized from the group are still under investigation, Mr Ajazi said. He expected the case to be “closed sooner” than August 2024, the deadline for him to file charges.

While bidding her time in Tirana, Ms. Timofeyeva is also reflecting on a request from Moscow for her extradition in connection with a case of illegal entry into a Russian underground military site in 2018. Both she and Mr. Zorin have spoken out about their opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, and she believes the extradition request could be an attempt to punish her for her outspokenness.

So far, that prospect seems unlikely. An Albanian court has rejected Russia’s extradition request on human rights grounds.

Mr Zorin, who is half Ukrainian, said the invasion of Ukraine was like “attacking our own brothers”. Russia has not asked Albania for his extradition and Mr Zorin said that even if he were released by Albania, he would not return home for fear he would be conscripted to fight in Ukraine.

Ms. Timofeyeva, who left Moscow for Georgia a month after the war started in February 2022, has shared posts with her nearly 250,000 followers on Instagramwhere she goes past Lana Sator, whom Mr. Putin calls a “crazy grandpa” and for an end to the conflict.

She said she was separated from her husband — who worked as a photographer for the Wagner Group, the private army that had fought on Russia’s behalf in Ukraine until it revolted this month — because he supported the war.

While living in Moscow, Ms Timofeyeva said, she worked with Russia’s Ministry of Culture to bolster local tourism, not the country’s intelligence agency.

Now she has applied for political asylum in Albania and said she had no plans to go back in the near future. “The prison in Russia is worse than here in Albania,” she said.

She spent the months in detention, she said, reading, learning Albanian and drawing pictures of the mountains near the prison and other subjects. She said she hoped to explore Albania and see more sights.

But, she asked, “Will it be espionage if we take a tourist boat to a tourist island?”

Fatjona Mejdini contributed report from Tirana.