Treason and espionage cases on the rise in Russia since Ukraine war began: NPR

TALLINN, Estonia — When Maksim Kolker’s phone rang at 6 a.m. and a voice on the other end said his father had been arrested, he assumed it was a scam trying to extort money. The day before, he had taken his father, Dmitry Kolker, a prominent Russian physicist, to hospital in their hometown of Novosibirsk, where his advanced pancreatic cancer had suddenly worsened.

The phone kept ringing and Kolker had to hang up several times, but finally his father called and confirmed the devastating news: As the family later learned, Kolker had been charged with treason, a crime that is investigated and prosecuted in secret in Russia and carries a long prison sentence.

Over the past three decades, treason cases have been rare in Russia, with only a few cases per year, but since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, treason charges have skyrocketed along with espionage prosecutions, ensnaring citizens and foreigners alike regardless of political affiliation.

This has led to comparisons with the show trials carried out under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1930s.

Recent victims range from Kremlin critics and independent journalists to veteran scientists working in countries Moscow considers friendly.

The cases stand out amid an unprecedented crackdown on dissent under President Vladimir Putin. They are being investigated almost exclusively by the powerful Federal Security Service (FSB), and specific charges or evidence have not always been released.

Defendants are often held in strict isolation in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison, tried behind closed doors and almost always found guilty and given long prison sentences.

In 2022, Putin called on security services to “strictly curb the actions of foreign intelligence services and quickly identify traitors, spies and saboteurs.”

The First Department, a human rights group that specializes in such prosecutions and is named after a division of the security services, counted more than 100 known treason cases in 2023, lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov told The Associated Press. He added that there are probably another 100 cases that no one knows about.

The longer the war continues, the more authorities want to arrest “more traitors,” Smirnov said.

Treason cases began to increase after 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine and backed separatist forces in the country’s east, putting it at odds with the West for the first time since the Cold War.

Two years ago, the legal definition of treason was expanded to include providing vague “assistance” to a foreign country or organization, effectively making anyone who has contact with foreigners subject to prosecution.

The move follows mass anti-government protests in Moscow in 2011 and 2012 that authorities say were instigated by Western countries. The legal changes were heavily criticized by human rights groups, including members of the Presidential Council for Human Rights.

Faced with such criticism at the time, Putin promised to consider amending the law and agreed that “what high treason is should not be interpreted too broadly.”

But that’s exactly what started to happen.

In 2015, authorities arrested Svetlana Davydova, a mother of seven from the western Smolensk Oblast, on charges of treason under a new, expanded definition of the crime.

She was charged with contacting the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow in 2014 to warn authorities there that she believed Russia was sending troops to eastern Ukraine, where a separatist insurgency against Kiev was unfolding.

The case drew national attention and public outrage. Russia denied at the time that its troops had been involved in eastern Ukraine, and many pointed out that the case against Davydova contradicted those claims. The charges against her were eventually dropped.

This outcome was a rare exception among the proliferation of treason and espionage cases in the following years, which consistently ended in convictions and prison sentences.

Paul Whelan, a US security executive who was in Moscow for the wedding, was arrested in 2018 and convicted of espionage two years later and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Whelan denies the charges.

Ivan Safronov, an adviser to the Roscosmos space agency and former military journalist, was convicted of treason and sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2022. His prosecution was widely seen as retaliation for his reporting exposing military affairs and corrupt arms deals.

“This is a very good lesson for journalists that they should not write anything about the defense sector,” his fiancée and fellow journalist Ksenia Mironova told The Associated Press.

The FSB also pursued scientists researching aerodynamics, hypersonics and other areas that could be used for weapons development.

Smirnov, the lawyer, said such arrests have surged since 2018, when Putin used his annual State of the Union address to tout new indigenous hypersonic weapons that Russia was developing.

In his view, this was the security services’ way of demonstrating to the Kremlin that Russian scientific advances, especially those used in weapons development, were extremely valuable and “every foreign intelligence service in the world was after it.”

He stressed that all the scientists arrested were civilians and that “military scientists are virtually never targeted.”

Many of the scientists deny the allegations, and their families and colleagues allege they were implicated in minor matters such as giving talks abroad or working with foreign scientists on collaborative projects.

Kolker, the son of the detained Novosibirsk physicist, said that when the FSB searched his father’s apartment, they sought several presentations his father had used in talks he gave in China.

Kolker’s father, who worked on light waves, gave presentations that were cleared for use abroad and in Russia, where “every student could tell he wasn’t spilling any beans,” Maxim Kolker said.

Nevertheless, FSB agents dragged the 54-year-old physicist from his hospital bed in 2022 and took him to Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, his son said.

According to his son, the sick scientist knew he had no chance of surviving in prison, but he called his family from the plane to say goodbye. A few days later, the family received a telegram informing them that he had died in hospital.

Other cases were similar: Valery Golubkin, 71, a Moscow physicist specializing in aerodynamics, was convicted of treason in 2023. The state research institute where he worked was working on an international project for a hypersonic civil aircraft, and he had been asked by his employer to help write a report on the project.

Smirnov of the First Division Group, who was involved in his defense, said the report had been vetted before being sent abroad and did not contain state secrets.

Golubkin’s daughter, Lyudmila, said the 2021 arrest came as a shock.

“He’s not guilty of anything,” she said. His 12-year sentence has been upheld despite appeals, and his family hopes he will be released on parole.

Other scientists working on hypersonics, an important application for missile development, have also been arrested on treason charges in recent years, including Anatoly Maslov, 77, who was convicted in May and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

The Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Novosibirsk wrote a letter in support of Maslov and two other physicists implicated because of their “presentations at international seminars and conferences, publications in respected journals and participation in international scientific projects,” which it said are “essential elements of conscientious and high-quality scientific activity” in Russia and abroad.

Two other recent high-profile cases involved prominent opposition politicians and journalists.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist turned activist, was charged with treason in 2022 after giving speeches in the West critical of Russia. After surviving what appeared to be poisoning attempts in 2015 and 2017, Kara-Murza was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison, but his family is concerned about his deteriorating health.

In his closing statement at the trial, Kara Murza referred to the Soviet Union’s dark history of prosecutions, which he said went “back to the 1930s.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested on espionage charges in 2023, becoming the first American journalist to be detained on such charges since the Cold War. Gershkovich, who went on trial in June, has denied the charges and the US government has declared he was wrongfully detained.

Russians were reportedly charged with treason or the less serious offence of “preparation to commit treason” for donating to Ukrainian charities and organisations fighting alongside Kiev’s army, setting fire to a Russian military enlistment office and even having personal phone conversations with Ukrainian friends about moving to Ukraine.

Ksenia Havana, 33, was arrested in Yekaterinburg in February on treason charges for allegedly raising funds for the Ukrainian military. Havana, a dual Russian and U.S. citizen, had returned from Los Angeles to visit family, and the First District said the charges stemmed from a $51 donation to a U.S.-based charity supporting Ukraine.

Experts say there are several factors motivating authorities to pursue further treason cases.

First, it sends a clear message that the unspoken rules have changed, sending conferences abroad and collaborating with foreign colleagues is no longer something scientists should do, says Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and expert on security agencies.

It would also be easier to get higher authorities to allocate resources, such as surveillance and wiretapping, to a treason case, he said.

Smirnov said the spike in prosecutions came after the FSB authorized its regional branches in 2022 to pursue certain types of treason cases, as officials in those branches sought to ingratiate themselves with their superiors to advance their careers.

Soldatov said what was most important was the FSB’s genuine and widespread belief in the “weakness of the regime” during periods of political turmoil, such as mass protests in 2011-2012 or the current war with Ukraine.

“They genuinely believe it could break, when in fact it isn’t,” he said.

Mironova, the fiancee of the imprisoned journalist Safronov, expressed a similar opinion.

She said FSB investigators believe they are catching “traitors” and “enemies of the Motherland” even though they know there is no evidence.