They can tell that so quickly?
"phones used in illegal activities"
That's an awfully quick turnaround on assessing a phone's previous usage. Can phones blush?
Russia's Interior Ministry has announced the arrest of two chaps suspected of conducting ransomware attacks on iPhones. The Ministry's statement on the arrests describes a modus operandi that sounds an awful lot like that employed by “Oleg Pliss”, an entity that last month remotely locked iThings in Australia. Apple later …
well, from now on, they will pay him (or "the state", which is the same thing, really), a cut (rather larger than before), as they'll be given a choice: go to prison, or hack for us the phones of those nasty imperialists. Being business-oriented, they will take the right decision.
That said, I'm not being anti-Putin (though I am, in general). Our glorious state and all other democracies would do exactly the same.