The Insider has discovered that the Second Service of the Federal Security Service (Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and Anti-Terrorism), whose employees were implicated in the poisoning of opponents Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza, is responsible for the doping program in Russian sports.
In particular, as the publication learned, Dmitry Kovalev, who in the summer of 2020 worked as a forensic expert for the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada) at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, where the suspension of Russian athletes from competitions for doping was considered, is a colonel of the 2nd Service of the Federal Security Service.
In those days, when Kovalev gave evidence to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, The Insider wrote, he was in constant contact by phone with Major General Vladimir Bogdanov, a key figure in the Center for Special Technologies (NII-2 FSB). Bogdanov at the time coordinated Navalny’s poisoning.
According to The Insider, the “Doping Project” has been implemented since 2015 by the Scientific Signal Center, which is de facto under Bogdanov’s operational control. The publication writes that they decided to create doping at Signal after Grigory Rodchenkov spoke out about the doping program in Russian sports.
Grigory Rodchenkov, who told the world about the state program to replace samples of Russian athletes during the 2014 Winter Olympics, wrote the book “Doping. Banned Pages.” This is at once self-fiction, production fiction, detective investigation, and a consistent debunking of the myth of “pure sport,” but it is also the life story of Rodchenkov himself. Order “Dope. Forbidden Pages” or you can buy other books from our publishing house in our website This link.
A source familiar with the internal structure of the Signal Center said that although toxin synthesis and steroid production are in no way related programs, all the projects “involve the same scientists using the same equipment.”
Kovalev, writes The Insider, is the common-law husband of Veronika Loginova, the new director general of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada). In February 2026, a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) whistleblower accused Loginova of personal involvement in the tampering of doping samples at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Loginova herself called these statements “fantasies” and threatened to sue for libel.
The Insider notes that the second service personnel are officially part of the leadership of the Russian Olympic Committee. For example, Nikolai Varfolomeev, an employee of the Second Service, is the President’s Security Advisor, and Rodion Pletukhin, who worked in the Second Service, served as Secretary General of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) in 2022-2024.
The Bell reported on April 16 that the FSB’s Second Service now also oversees the Russian Internet. According to one of the publication’s sources, in the summer of 2025, a meeting took place between the head of the 2nd Service, Alexei Sedov, and Vladimir Putin. At that meeting, Sedov promised the president “to restore order on the Internet — and got carte blanche.”
Meduza can be read even during lockdowns. Our site will open without VPN and dance with tambourines using this magic connection (Save it!) or using a browser plugin (How to install it). But the most reliable way is to read Meduza in the app: download Him and we will be in touch no matter what happens.
The second service, according to The Bell’s interviewers, was the one that popularized call blocking on WhatsApp and Telegram in August, and is now struggling with ways to bypass the blocking.
In particular, a source in the payment services market told The Bell newspaper that, at the request of the Second Service of the Federal Security Service, checks were carried out in some large payment services. They were asked if they process user payments for VPN services. One of the newspaper’s interlocutors said that representatives of the Second Service “now go everywhere and decide everything.”