[saint_fiasco]

It's more likely that Russia just does not like Tor in general, so they find excuses to put users in jail and mess with their devices just to dissuade other people from using Tor.

From that perspective, your theory is not so far-fetched because it's not like the Russian government went through a lot of effort to frame this activist in particular. Any other Tor user would do.

[smsm42]

Added to that, they need to show they are fighting terrorism online. Finding actual terrorists is hard and dangerous. Finding people reposting memes on Facebook or running Tor exit nodes and jailing them under terrorism and "extremism" laws is much more cost effective, and looks the same in the statistical reports. Since there is no independent courts in Russia and prosecutorial abuse is almost never punished (it's very hard to punish it even in the US, in Russia it's orders of magnitude harder), and acquittal in Russian court is vanishingly rare (only 0.4% criminal cases end in acquittal) - there's no risk involved except for maybe couple of articles in the press.