So from my random sample, we have

• An ex-marine dishonorably discharged for unspecified 'larceny' with Russian FSB connections and caught with a USB full of state secrets. If that doesn't scream "the CIA blackmailed me into this work" I don't know what does.
• A journalist caught red-handed snooping on battle tank factories.
• A journalist who works at an, ex-CIA, American funded propaganda outlet who snuck into Russia and forgot to mention it for over two weeks.
• A guy who literally worked for an organisation whose sole purpose was to discredit and supplant the government.

So yeah, definitely not just innocent randos going about their innocent business.

Wikipedia quotes -

Paul Whelan is a Canadian-born former United States Marine ... Whelan left the Marines in 2008 with a bad conduct discharge after being convicted on multiple counts "related to larceny".

The BBC cited family members of Whelan, who said Whelan had previously bragged about knowing an agent of the FSB, and was privy to an unusual number of personal details about his friend, including which intelligence training school he attended

Whelan was apprehended in his hotel room at the Metropol Hotel while concluding a long outing with a Russian citizen, who handed him a USB flash drive containing "a list of all the employees at a classified security agency".

--

On March 29, 2023, while Gershkovich was on assignment in Yekaterinburg, the counterintelligence department of the Federal Security Service (FSB) detained him for having information on a "Russian defence enterprise". Russian officials said he was collecting secrets on the "production and repair of military equipment"

Russian president Vladimir Putin's press secretary, said that he was "caught red-handed"

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said "we have irrefutable evidence that Gershkovich was engaged in espionage"

--

Alsu Kurmasheva is a Prague-based Russian-American journalist with Radio Free Europe Kurmasheva was arrested in Kazan, Russia on October 18, 2023, and charged with failure to register as a foreign agent the charges against Kurmasheva allege that she “deliberately conducted a targeted collection of military information about Russian activities via the internet to transmit information to foreign sources."

--

Andrei Pivovarov on March 2021, was charged with carrying out the activities of an undesirable organisation for Open Russia's role in organising the Moscow Congress of Municipal Deputies.

(The Moscow Congress is a political group whose stated purpose is to be the only truly representative parliament of Russia and seeks to overthrow the actual one. So basically a stupidly out-in-the-open coup group.)

Also a funny snippet:

The congress positions itself as a meeting of “the only representatives of society and the state who have the democratic legitimacy”.

Ilya Ponomarev answered during the congress that .. "Russia needs a temporary body for the transfer of power, and they “will hold elections later.”

they were probably talking to dissidents and trying to stir up shit thinking being american would protect them

About 90% probability.