Taking a group calling itself "Fancy Bears" (a name coined by US intelligence for the authors of a set of hacking methods years ago) at face value is moronic. If APT28 were sponsored by the Russian government, it wouldn't be letting it make such a spectacle of itself.
Rather, the tools used by APT28 entered the wild the moment they were first used, and now, years later, they can and are used by anybody. Not that whoever these "Fancy Bears" are have anything to do with those methods; they just throw the name around because it gets them attention in the west. That's assuming there's a "they" at all, not just one person.
As for "risking her life," that crosses from moronic well into ignorant and bigoted coming from an American. Nobody has been executed in Russia in more than 20 years. The USA meanwhile has the world's highest incarceration rate and its police regularly murder people on the street for being black, poor, or no reason at all. Stop with the ignorant Cold War tropes.