Investigators alleged that Valery Mitko, president of the Arctic Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, giving documents containing state secrets to Chinese intelligence in early 2018 at China Maritime University, China, where he was a visiting professor, his lawyer Ivan Pavlov told CNN.
According to Pavlov, the document in question is related to hydroacoustics, the study of sound in water that is commonly applied in underwater navigation, communication and monitoring of submarine activities, among others.
Mitko, 78, denies making a mistake. His lawyer stated that all information brought by scientists from Russia to China for his studies was openly available. The press service of the Federal Security Service did not respond to requests for comment.
Mitko was charged with treason and was put under house arrest in February this year, but details of the case only appear now, after Pavlov’s defense team, Komanda29, which specializes in state security and espionage cases, took it to attract public attention. .
Analysts at Russia-China relations believe that spying charges against an Arctic researcher could highlight growing competition between the two countries in the region. Moscow and Beijing have built strategic partnerships in the North Pole amid rising tensions with the West, but Russia has been cautious about military cooperation in the field, said Alexander Gabuev, Russia’s chairman of the Carnegie Moscow Center Asia-Pacific Program.
“China really shows that it has military ambitions by the way its intelligence sees these things,” Gabuev said. “Submarines operate in neutral waters and we might see a new frontline in developing China’s global navy. And submarines that can operate in the Arctic are part of that.”
Some Russian academics have been accused or convicted of giving state secrets to foreign governments in recent years. In 2018, a Moscow court charged Viktor Kudryavtsev, an aerospace engineer, with treason for allegedly sharing a report containing information about Russian hypersonic weapons with a Belgian institution after a joint research program, the state-run agency TASS reported.
Kudryavtsev, who is in his late 70s, spent more than a year in a detention center but was transferred to house arrest due to poor health. His case is still under pre-trial investigation. Two other employees from the same institution where Kudryavtsev worked since his arrest were accused of treason, according to the state-owned news agency TASS.
Another space researcher, 79-year-old Vladimir Lapygin, was released from prison last week with initial parole, following the 2016 conviction for continuing technical details about the Russian spaceship to China, according to TASS.
All scientists have denied making mistakes, saying that the information they accused was not classified.
Pavlov, the lawyer, has suggested that the case is a paranoia product in Russian special services. Court statistics show that the total number of cases related to state security skyrocketed after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which resulted in “militaristic sentiment” in law enforcement, he said.
According to data published by the Russian Supreme Court, from 2009 to 2013, a total of 25 people were found guilty of treason, and in 2014 alone there were 15 sentences. Between 2014 and 2019, 51 people were convicted of treason.
“There is a group of people who are at risk of having sensitive information or gathering such information, and first of all these are scientists but can also be journalists or civic activists,” the lawyer added. “[The special services] monitors that have international relations and foreign contacts, so the red light blinks a little once they go abroad … and the mentality of our agent says if a scientist goes abroad, he of course goes there to sell secrets. “
Since China declared itself a “country near the North Pole,” the country has significantly increased efforts to increase its presence there, often with Russian assistance and bypassing other coastal states allied with the US and NATO. Russia, on the other hand, has made priority of revamping its territory in the Arctic circle, which was largely abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In March, President Vladimir Putin launched an ambitious Arctic 2035 plan with hopes of returning jobs to the region, by developing large energy projects that were heavily invested by China, and Russia wanted to export oil and gas when the North Sea Route became increasingly free. ice.
