The Russian player arrested in June 2023 was sentenced to almost three years in prison for espionage in Poland. The French L’Équipe tells how the wild story progressed from 2021.
Russian ice hockey player Maxim Sergeev21, has received a prison sentence of two years and 11 months in Poland for espionage, says the French L’Équipe-leaf.
In addition, Sergejev has been fined 5,200 zlotys, or 1,220 euros. The money earned during espionage and 7.28 grams of cannabis, which he had in his possession on the day of his arrest in June 2023, have also been confiscated from the man.
Poland will deport Sergejev back to his homeland on May 26, 2025. Until then, he will serve his sentence in Lublin prison.
In a comprehensive article, L’Équipe magazine explains how the wild story really unfolded.
The dream crumbled
As a child, Sergejev dreamed of becoming a professional hockey player. In October 2021, he finally set out to pursue it. The 18-year-old youth boarded a plane at Sheremetyevo airport, wearing a Spartak Moscow jacket, bound for Krakow.
The hard-nosed defender left Zaglebie Sosnowiec, who plays in the Polish main league, to get a place in the game. Sosnowiec is a city of about 200,000 inhabitants located next to Katowice in southern Poland.
However, the level of the Polish main league turned out to be so tough that Sergejev could not properly play in the first team. So he was dropped to Zaglebie’s “farm gang” below the league level. At the same time, the salary also dropped significantly.
In the following season (2022–2023), there were no more games in the first team. However, Sergeev still lived in the room provided by the club, but the money was low. So, in addition to playing games, he started working in the food delivery industry.
The professional dream began to crumble.
Andrej offered a job
The Telegram application was found on Sergeev’s phone. It is a social media channel developed by Russians, where users can message each other.
At the beginning of 2023, Sergeev ran into Telegram Andreito a person named “Job opportunities in Krakow” and “Little gigs in Warsaw”.
Andrej was actually on the payroll of the FSB, the Russian security service. On January 27, 2023, Sergeev, 19, became a Russian secret agent, although he didn’t know it yet.
The first tasks were easy. Andrej suggested to Sergeev that he just write messages on social media stating that the war in Ukraine was not the war of the Polish people. He was also tasked with commenting on the President of the United States Joe Biden As requested by Andrej.
Sergeev was paid for the messages in the form of a few dollars in cryptocurrencies.
Undercover filming
Poland has hundreds of kilometers of common border with Russia. That is why the eastern part of the country is an important intelligence target for Russia. According to L’Équipe magazine, more than two-thirds of military aid to Ukraine also goes through Poland.
Sergejev was soon assigned the task of searching for establishments connected in one way or another to the Polish army or NATO forces. The information had to be documented as well as possible.
He was asked to find an apartment in the vicinity of Sosnowiec, from where the military equipment manufacturing factory can be seen as well as possible. No apartment could be found, but Sergejev came up with the idea of setting up the cameras on the roof of a shop to film the factory.
Soon, Sergeev was part of a cell of about fifteen people whose members were promised $10,000 if they managed to derail a train on its way to Ukraine.
– This was supposed to happen a few days before the US president’s visit to our country in February 2023, the investigator of the case tells L’Équipe magazine.
Polish authorities were aware of the cell. They would have liked to continue observing it, but had to stop it because of the train schedule.
However, Sergeev was not arrested yet.
“Not James Bond”
A couple of weeks after the cell members had been arrested, Sergeev received a message from Andrej again, who had changed his number and name. Now he was “Gabriel“.
Gabriel asked Sergeev to set fire to a house and a car that he said belonged to a “corrupt Belarusian”. Sergeev no longer agreed to this.
However, he still took, for example, photographs and forwarded them until in June 2023 the former hockey player was arrested on suspicion of espionage. It came as a shock in Sergeev’s company.
– Maxim was only a player of our second team. He arrived here before the conflict in Ukraine. Until his arrest, we had no idea what he was doing, club boss Piotr Majewski tells.
Adrian Pietrzykanother of Zaglebie’s bosses, was equally surprised.
– He was nothing James Bond. He didn’t have the style of a spy at all, and he never did anything spectacular before or during his arrest, says Pietrzyk.
Sergeev also had no problems with the club’s Ukrainian players.
– No one could guess who he really was.
Money talks
In addition to Sergeev, Belarusians and even Ukrainians were also accused of espionage. When Ukrainians were asked in the interrogations if they were not worried that Russia would win the war, the answer was harsh.
– The most important thing was money and the opportunity to eat. It’s that simple, and that’s why these recruitments, which are quite easy to do, are scary, one researcher said.
Very detailed summaries of the “reconnaissance days” were found on Sergeev’s computer. One of Sergeev’s teammates had only wondered why the defender traveled so often.
– But you couldn’t have imagined all this. To us, he was a normal guy. We never thought that he could be a spy or anything like that.