I think it is pretty clear that the guy didn't care that much about his anonymity, similar to the pirate bay people.

Accepting btc was probably more because of convenience of payments etc instead of anonymity.

Agreed, but beware hindsight bias.

I don't see that as a case of hindsight bias. I was expecting that every owner of a torrent site pays domains and hosting with bitcoins and always uses VPNs if not even TOR for work that could be logged somewhere (e.g. emails using a large provider).

Had it just been this one Apple purchase or a Facebook visit then I'd agree, there's always something you'll miss and it's much easier to point this out afterwards. But it appears that he didn't use a single method to hide his identity.

On the other hand, perhaps he thought that living in the Ukraine would give him enough protection against US agents.

OPSEC in the age of mass surveillance is incredibly hard. Zoz gave[1] has a very good overview of modern OPSEC. Staying anonymous requires an attention to detail that most people probably cannot do.

The hindsight bias is realizing how serious the situation might be and the level of OPSEC that is required. When the torrent site was first created the risk level wasn't known and most people didn't understand how hard it is to avoid the ubiquitous sensors of the surveillance-industriual-complex. Yes, more people probably should have assumed this level of risk much earlier, but that's easy to say now when we know names like Prism and XKEYSCORE.

[1] (note: contains rude/strong language) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1q4Ir2J8P8

It's crazy how torrent site owners are criminalised. Eg Oink who got raided and his site shut down, then found not guilty more than 2 years later, with his amazing community stomped into the ground by the copyright police. He did nothing wrong, nothing was illegal, yet they used their power to kill it.

He probably has the legal recourse.