The gavel has fallen, and the sentence is as heavy as the iron shackles now binding three miserable wretches. In the cold halls of the Second Western District Military Court, a dark tale of betrayal reached its conclusion. Three men—one Зайцев, born in the year '84, and two younger fellows, Дмитриев and Журавлев—found their fate sealed by the law. For their crimes of treason and the preparation of bloody atrocities, they have been condemned to the rigours of a strict regime colony for a period stretching up to twenty-five years. A few years of solitary confinement in a dungeon-like cell shall precede their long toil, and heavy fines have been levied to strip them of every last farthing.

These scoundrels, lured by the whispers of foreign masters, played a dangerous game of shadows. Through the secret channels of the Telegram, they conspired with handlers from across the border, acting as spies in their own land. They prowled about the defence works and critical outposts of Kostroma, Smolensk, and Tula, gathering intelligence like common street-thieves. They ventured into the damp dark to retrieve explosives from hidden caches, plotting to ignite a firestorm of terror. But the watchful eyes of the state's detectives—the relentless hounds of the FSB—were upon them. The plot was thwarted; the fuse was cut before the spark could fly.

Such is the way of these foreign agents: they promise a mountain of gold and a swift passage to foreign shores to lure the desperate and the greedy. Yet, as any old hand in a rookery knows, such promises are naught but wind. The traitors are left with nothing but the cold stone of a prison wall.

But the tide of villainy does not ebb easily. Scarcely had the ink dried on these verdicts when another rogue was plucked from the streets of the Yaroslavl region. This wretch, a puppet of a sinister Syrian cabal, had planned to cast a torch into a synagogue. He had been caught red-handed with the ingredients for a combustible mixture, having spent his hours sketching the grounds and taking photographs of the house of worship, like a common criminal casing a joint before a heist. He now awaits his own date with the hangman's shadow or the prison gate.