A Volgograd blogger has been arrested in connection with an extortion case.

A court has sentenced Volgograd blogger Alexey Ulyanov to two months' detention on extortion charges. In court, he admitted receiving money for his posts, but that everything was legal.

As reported by "Caucasian Knot," blogger Alexey Ulyanov, detained by security forces in Volgograd, was hospitalized after being arrested on extortion charges, but this morning he was transferred to a pretrial detention center. According to investigators, he demanded money for not publishing information undesirable for businessmen.

The Volgograd Central District Court has arrested blogger Alexey Ulyanov, suspected of a series of extortion cases, the joint press service of the Volgograd Region courts reported today.

According to investigators, beginning in 2020, Alexey Ulyanov demanded money from the heads of organizations and individuals, as well as their close associates, in exchange for not disseminating defamatory information. The amounts he intended to receive ranged from 100,000 to 6 million rubles.

By order of the Volgograd Central District Court, Alexey Ulyanov was remanded in custody until February 2, 2026, the report states.

In court, Ulyanov admitted receiving money for publications. Specifically, this concerns retired Interior Ministry Colonel Igor Dailidenko, who, after resigning and going into business, was sentenced for embezzling 18 million rubles worth of grain and failing to pay wages. In August 2022, Dailidenko was sentenced to five years in prison. Since January 2023, Alexey Ulyanov has been actively writing on his LiveJournal blog about the "repressions" against the Dailidenko family, mentioning the convicted man's partner, Rashid Karsakov. Today, during the trial, Ulyanov confirmed that Dailidenko paid him for all his posts, Vysota 102 reports.

"Dailidenko, yes, he paid me for every publication. Why did he suddenly stop writing? Because Dailidenko was jailed. They stopped paying—they stopped writing. And his wife repeatedly contacted him. And I published several more times—even after Dailidenko was already in prison. This is completely normal. Everything went through the "My Tax" program. All taxes have been paid, in case anyone is interested," he is quoted as saying in the publication.

Alexei Ulyanov's wife reported that they "haven't seen" the money he is suspected of extorting. "Where is this money? We haven't seen it. We bought him a car, a 2008 Nissan, for a little over 800,000. We sold our first car, took out a loan, and bought it. "We live within our means, as best we can," V1 quoted her as saying.

She previously reported that her child's laptop was confiscated during a search, and she was deprived of her computer. "We live in a dorm, we have two old cars, we live quite modestly, and yet we are being charged with especially large amounts of money. Apparently, they bought a villa in the Canary Islands. We will try to appeal to the federal level, to Alexander Bastrykin. I don't expect anything to be resolved at the local level," Ulyanov's wife was quoted as saying in a publication dated December 3.