Two Russian physicists were sentenced to 12.5 years in prison by a court in Novosibirsk, in the Siberian region, for high treason after publishing a scientific article in an Iranian magazine.
According to the news agency Valery Zvegintsev is a researcher at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, studying hypersonic technologies, while Vladislav Galkin is an associate professor at Tomsk Polytechnic University.
Both scientists published work on gas dynamics. In September 2024, a St. Petersburg court sentenced veteran Russian scientist Anatoly Maslov to 14 years in prison for providing China with information about Russian hypersonic weapons.
It has already happened to 15 scientists
Since 2018, approximately 15 Russian scientists have been arrested and charged with espionage and high treason, including 78-year-old Valery Mitko and 75-year-old Viktor Kudryavtsev.
Mitko was accused of providing confidential information to China, while Kudryavtsev allegedly sent two messages with alleged “state secrets” to a member country of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The Russian Presidency (Kremlin) previously stated that the accusations against Siberian scientists were “very serious”, after receiving an open letter from colleagues denouncing the persecution of the scientific community.
The ‘witch hunt’ launched by security forces against the Russian scientific community to prevent the disclosure of state secrets intensified in 2018, but escalated with the start of the war against Ukraine in February 2022.
