Russia accuses Arctic researcher of treason

ONE of Russia’s best-known Arctic researchers is facing 20 years in prison on charges of treason.

Valery Mitko, a 78-year old former naval officer and president of the prominent Russian Arctic Academy, is accused of passing state secrets to China during a trip in 2018, his attorneys said.

The elderly man is one of several scientists in recent years to face charges of treason related to routine academic work in what has been described as an intimidation campaign by Russian intelligence. Mr Mitko, who served in the Navy for 30 years before retiring in 1994, was detained in February this year and charged with treason, according to the lawyers’ association Team 29 that recently took up his case.

The scientist has been granted bail and placed under house arrest. A court in St Petersburg earlier this month extended his detention until October.

Attorney Ivan Pavlov, who leads Mr Mitko’s defence team, says treason cases in Russia are notoriously fraught with abuse by law enforcement.

“Criminal cases like that represent the quickest career path for police officers, investigators and prosecutors” since most of the case files are classified, he said in a statement. “The shroud of secrecy makes it extremely difficult to get a fair trial.”

Charges against Mr Mitko, who was a guest lecturer on hydrophysics at China’s Dalian Maritime University, relate to his trip to China in 2018. Investigators say that Russian intelligence agents found a document in his luggage with technical details of submarines, including a Russian one.

Mr Mitko has been leading the Arctic Academy of Sciences, shaping Russia’s policy of tapping the Arctic’s vast resources. Defence attorneys for Mr Mitko say that they have no information about the information that he was accused of passing to China.

Mr Mitko is at least the third septuagenarian scientist to have been slapped with treason charges in recent years.

Viktor Kudryavtsev, 76, a prominent researcher at a Russian rocket and spacecraft design institute, was charged in 2018 with passing state secrets about Russia’s hypersonic weapons to Belgian colleagues via an email. He insists that he was sharing publicly available research. He was released from jail last year after he was diagnosed with lung cancer and now awaits trial.

While most of the recent treason cases have named EU countries and the US, China has only recently begun to appear in case files as the interested party. Just last week, space scientist Vladimir Lapygin, 79, was granted early release after serving four years of the seven-year sentence imposed on him in 2016 for passing state secrets about hypersonic aircraft to China.

‘ Criminal cases like that represent the quickest career path for police officers... and prosecutors’