TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Russia has spent the past decade sharp increase in treason and espionage cases.
Lawyers and experts say prosecutions for these serious crimes began to grow after 2014 — the year Russia illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. That’s also the year Moscow supported a separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine.
The number of cases of treason and espionage in Russia has increased dramatically after the Kremlin troops sent to Ukraine in February 2022, and President Vladimir Putin urged security services to “ruthlessly suppress the actions of foreign intelligence agencies (and) promptly identify traitors, spies and saboteurs.” The crackdown has ensnared scientists and journalists, as well as ordinary citizens.
A look at some Treason cases prosecuted in Russia during the past years:
Oksana Sevastidi
In April 2008, bakery worker Oksana Sevastidi spotted military equipment on a railway track near Sochi, the Russian Black Sea resort where she lived. She texted a friend in neighboring Georgia about it. Weeks later, in August, the two countries fought a brief war that ended with Moscow recognizing South Ossetia and another Georgian province, Abkhazia, as independent states and bolstering its military presence there.
Sevastidi was arrested in 2015, following 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 on the case 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 her punishment “harsh” and promised to look into it, saying that “she wrote what she saw” in her texts and that it was not a state secret. In 2017, Putin has pardoned Sevastidi and two other women.
Ivan Safronov
Ivan Safronov, former journalist who later worked for the Russian space agency Roscosmos, was arrested in 2020 and accused of passing military secrets to the Czech intelligence service and a German citizen. In September 2022, a Moscow court convicted him of treason and sentenced him to 22 years in prison.
Safronov came to prominence as a military affairs reporter for Kommersant, a leading business newspaper. He vehemently rejected the charges against him, arguing that he had gathered all the information from open sources as part of his journalistic work and had done nothing illegal.
Colleagues called the verdict unfounded and urged Safronov’s release, suggesting authorities may have wanted to punish him for his reporting on military and space incidents and arms trafficking.
His fiancée, Ksenia Mironova, told the Associated Press news agency that she believes such treason cases, which are investigated in secret and trials held behind closed doors, are convenient for law enforcement because the allegations can go unchallenged:
“They don’t have to explain anything to anyone. Not that they even bother. … But (in public trials) there’s still a chance that some unlucky journalists will come and write something. With treason, the case is closed and they can just make something up, and that’s it,” said Mironova, who is also a journalist and has covered the rise in treason prosecutions.
Valery Golubkin
Valery Golubkin, now 71, was a physicist specializing in aerodynamics when he was arrested in 2021 and convicted of treason in June 2023He 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 had merely submitted research reports on an international hypersonic civil aircraft project in which his state institute was involved.
According to lawyer Smirnov, the reports did not contain state secrets and were checked in accordance with regulations before being sent abroad.
In a letter from prison to Russian news outlet RBK in 2021, Golubkin said that the project in question had been approved by the Ministry of Trade and that the charges against him are based on the testimony of his supervisor, Anatoly Gubanov, who was arrested several months before Golubkin.
Gubanov, 66, was also convicted of treason and sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2023.
Golubkin’s lawyers appealed his sentence and lost. In April 2024, the Supreme Court overturned the appeal ruling and ordered a new review, but ultimately the original sentence was upheld.
His daughter, Lyudmila Golubkina, told the AP that neither the family nor Golubkin had high hopes following the Supreme Court ruling. They now hope he can be released on probation after serving two-thirds of his sentence.
“If someone has something to live for, a purpose, that helps them overcome anything,” she said. “I hope we will 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 2022 invasion of his native country. He was convicted of vandalism and given a six-month suspended release.
He was later rearrested on the more serious charge of “preparation for treason,” according to the First Department, a human rights group that investigates treason cases.
The charges against him stem from phone calls he made to family members and friends, suggesting he consider moving to Ukraine and volunteering as a pilot to transport wounded people or deliver humanitarian aid, the rights group and media reports said.
In January 2024, Pokusin was convicted of the charge of “preparation for treason” and sentenced to eight years in prison. According to the First Department, he died behind bars in June.
Supporters of Memorial, Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organization, have declared Pokusin, Sevastidi, Safronov and several others accused of treason as political prisoners.