TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Over the past decade, Russia has seen a sharp increase in cases of treason and espionage.
Lawyers and experts say prosecutions for these serious crimes began to rise after 2014 – the year Russia illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. It was also at this time that Moscow supported a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine.
The number of treason and espionage cases in Russia actually increased after the Kremlin sent troops to Ukraine in February 2022, and President Vladimir Putin urged the security services to “harshly suppress the actions of foreign intelligence services (and) promptly identify traitors, spies and saboteurs.” The crackdown attracted scientists and journalists as well as ordinary citizens.
A look at some treason cases prosecuted in Russia in the last years:
Oksana Sevastidi
In April 2008, baker Oksana Sevastidi saw military equipment on the railway near Sochi, the Russian Black Sea resort where she lived. She texted a friend who lived in neighboring Georgia about it. Weeks later, in August, the two countries fought a brief war, which ended with Moscow recognizing South Ossetia and another Georgian province, Abkhazia, as independent states and strengthening its military presence in those countries.
Sevastidi was arrested in 2015 over her text messages and convicted of treason the following year. The case made national headlines after Ivan Pavlov and Evgeny Smirnov, prominent lawyers specializing in treason cases, took it on in 2016. That same year, Pavlov’s team revealed that several other Sochi women had been convicted of treason in eerily similar cases. .
President Vladimir Putin was asked about Sevastidi at his annual press conference in December 2016. He called the sentence “harsh” and promised to investigate, saying “she wrote what she saw” in her texts and that it did not constitute a secret. state. In 2017, Putin pardoned Sevastidi and two other women.
Ivan Safronov
Ivan Safronov, a former journalist who went on to work for the Russian space agency Roscosmos, was arrested in 2020 and accused of passing military secrets to Czech intelligence and a German citizen. In September 2022, a Moscow court convicted him of treason and sentenced him to 22 years in prison.
Safronov rose to prominence as a military affairs reporter for Kommersant, a leading business newspaper. He vehemently rejected the allegations against him, arguing that he collected all information from open sources as part of his journalistic work and did nothing illegal.
Colleagues denounced the verdict as unfounded and pressed for Safronov’s release, suggesting authorities might want to punish him for his reporting on military and space incidents and arms deals.
His fiancee, Ksenia Mironova, told the Associated Press that she believes such treason cases, which are investigated in secret with trials held behind closed doors, are convenient for law enforcement because their accusations can remain unchallenged:
“They don’t need to explain anything to anyone. Not that they care anyway. …But (with open trials), there is still a chance that some unfortunate journalists will come and write something. With treason, the case is closed, and they can just invent something, and that’s it,” said Mironova, who is also a journalist and has reported the increase in treason cases.
Valery Golubkin
Valery Golubkin, now 71 years old, was a physicist specializing in aerodynamics when he was arrested in 2021 and convicted of treason in June 2023. He was sentenced to 12 years in a maximum security prison.
According to his lawyers, authorities accused Golubkin of sharing state secrets with a foreign country. The scientist and his defense team argued that he only submitted research reports on an international hypersonic civil aircraft project in which his state institute was involved.
The reports did not contain state secrets and were examined in accordance with regulations before being sent abroad, according to lawyer Smirnov.
In a letter sent from behind bars to Russian media outlet RBK in 2021, Golubkin said that the project in question was approved by the Ministry of Commerce and that the charges against him are based on the testimony of his supervisor, Anatoly Gubanov, who was imprisoned for several months. before Golubkin.
Gubanov, 66, was also convicted of treason and sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2023.
Golubkin’s lawyers appealed the verdict and lost. In April 2024, the Supreme Court annulled the decision on the appeal and ordered a new review of it, but in the end the original sentence was upheld.
His daughter, Lyudmila Golubkina, told the AP that neither the family nor Golubkin had high expectations following the Supreme Court’s ruling, and now hope he can be released on parole after serving two-thirds of his sentence.
“When a person has something to live for, a goal, it helps them get through everything,” she said. “I hope we can still see him as a free man.”
Igor Pokusin
Igor Pokusin, a 62-year-old retired pilot born in Ukraine, was arrested in the southern Siberian city of Abakan for protesting Russia’s invasion of his homeland in 2022. He was convicted of vandalism and sentenced to six months of restrictions similar to parole.
He was later arrested again on the more serious charge of “preparation for treason,” according to the First Department, a human rights group that investigates treason cases.
The accusations against him stemmed from phone calls to family and friends in which he considered moving to Ukraine and volunteering as a pilot to transport the injured or deliver humanitarian aid, according to the rights group and media reports.
In January 2024, Pokusin was convicted on charges of “preparation for treason” and sentenced to eight years in prison. The First Department said he died behind bars in June.
Defenders of Memorial, Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights group, declared that Pokusin, Sevastidi, Safronov and several others accused of treason were designated as political prisoners.
