Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, cases of treason and espionage have been increasing in Russia

TALLINN, Estonia – When Maksim Kolker’s phone rang at 6 a.m. and the voice on the other end said his father had been arrested, he thought it was an extortion scheme. The day before, he had taken his father, the well-known Russian physicist Dmitry Kolker, to the hospital in his hometown of Novosibirsk when his advanced pancreatic cancer had suddenly worsened.

The phone rang incessantly and Kolker hung up until his father finally called to confirm the terrible news. As the family later learned, the elder Kolker had been accused of treason, a crime that is investigated and prosecuted in the strictest secrecy in Russia and punishable by long prison sentences.

Over the past 30 years, there have been few cases of treason in Russia, a handful each year. But since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they have skyrocketed, as have espionage prosecutions, affecting both Russian citizens and foreigners, regardless of their political views.

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

The latest victims include Kremlin critics and independent journalists as well as experienced scientists working with countries that Moscow considers friendly.

These cases stand out in a crackdown on dissent that has reached unprecedented levels under President Vladimir Putin. They are investigated almost exclusively by the powerful Federal Security Service (FSB), with specific charges and evidence not always disclosed.

The defendants are often held in strict isolation in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison, their trials take place behind closed doors and they are almost always sentenced to long prison terms.

In 2022, Putin called on security agencies to “toughly suppress the actions of foreign intelligence services and promptly identify traitors, spies and saboteurs.”

The First Department, a human rights group specializing in such prosecutions that takes its name from a security service division, counted over 100 known cases of treason in 2023, lawyer Evgeny Smirnov told the Associated Press, adding that there were probably another 100 that no one knew about.

The longer the war lasts, “the more traitors” the authorities want to catch, said Smirnov.

The number of treason cases increased from 2014 onwards, after Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, supported a separatist insurgency in the east of the country and fell out with the West for the first time since the Cold War.

Two years earlier, the legal definition of high treason was expanded to include the vaguely defined “support” of other countries or organizations. This meant that anyone who had contact with foreigners was subject to criminal prosecution.

The move followed mass protests against the government in Moscow in 2011/12, which authorities said were instigated by the West. The changes to the law were met with strong criticism from human rights activists, including the President’s Human Rights Council.

In light of this criticism, Putin promised at the time to look into the amended law and agreed that there should be “no broad interpretation of what constitutes treason.”

And yet that is exactly what began to happen.

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

She was accused of contacting the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow in 2014 to warn officials there that she believed Russia was sending troops to eastern Ukraine, where the separatist uprising against Kyiv was taking place.

The case attracted national attention and public outrage. Russia denied at the time that its troops were deployed in eastern Ukraine, and many pointed out that the case against Davydova contradicted that narrative. The charges against her were eventually dropped.

This outcome was a rare exception given the increasing number of treason and espionage cases in the years that followed, which always ended in convictions and prison sentences.

Paul Whelan, an American security executive who traveled to Moscow for a wedding, was arrested in 2018 and sentenced to 16 years in prison two years later for espionage. He denied the charges.

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

“For them, it is a very good warning example that journalists should not write about the defense sector,” his fiancée and fellow reporter Ksenia Mironova told AP.

The FSB also took action against scientists working on aerodynamics, hypersound and other areas that could be useful for weapons development.

According to lawyer Smirnov, such arrests increased after 2018, when Putin touted new and unique hypersonic weapons that Russia was developing in his annual State of the Nation address.

In his view, this is the security services’ way of showing the Kremlin that Russian scientific advances, especially those used to develop weapons, are so valuable that “all foreign intelligence services in the world are after them.”

He stressed that all of the scientists arrested were civilians and that “action is practically never taken against military scientists.”

Many of the scientists denied the allegations, with their families and colleagues insisting that they were implicated for reasons as innocuous as the fact that they were lecturing abroad or working on joint projects with foreign scientists.

Kolker, the son of the imprisoned Novosibirsk physicist, said that when the FSB searched his father’s apartment, they were looking for several presentations he had used in lectures in China.

The elder Kolker, who had studied light waves, gave lectures that were approved for use abroad and were also given in Russia, and “every student could understand that he was not revealing anything (secret),” Maksim Kolker said.

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

The ailing scientist called his family from the plane to say goodbye, knowing he was unlikely to survive prison, the son said. A few days later, the family received a telegram informing them of his death in a hospital.

Other cases have been similar. Valery Golubkin, a 71-year-old Moscow physicist specializing in aerodynamics, was convicted of treason in 2023. His state research institute was working on an international project for a hypersonic civilian aircraft, and he was asked by his employer to help cover the project.

Smirnov of the First Ministry, who was involved in his defense, says the reports were checked before being sent abroad and did not contain any state secrets.

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

“He is innocent,” she said. His 12-year sentence was upheld despite appeals and his family now hopes he will be released on parole.

Other scientists working on hypersonics, an area with important applications for missile development, have also been arrested for treason in recent years. One of them, 77-year-old Anatoly Maslov, was sentenced to 14 years in prison in May.

The Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Novosibirsk has written a letter supporting Maslow and two other physicists who are accused of “giving lectures at international seminars and conferences, publishing articles in highly respected journals and participating in international scientific projects.” Such activities, the letter says, are “an obligatory part of conscientious and high-quality scientific activity,” both in Russia and elsewhere.

Two other recent high-profile cases involved a prominent opposition politician and a journalist.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist turned activist, was charged with treason in 2022 after giving anti-Russian speeches in the West. After surviving alleged poisoning attacks in 2015 and 2017, Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His family fears for his deteriorating health.

In his closing argument in court, Kara-Murza referred to the dark history of law enforcement in the USSR, saying the country had “gone back to the 1930s.”

Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal was arrested on espionage charges in 2023. He was the first American reporter since the Cold War to be jailed on such charges. Gershkovich, who went on trial in June, denies the charges, and the U.S. government has said his detention was wrongful.

Russians have reportedly been charged with treason – or the less serious charge of “preparing to commit treason.” Charges include donating money to Ukrainian charities or groups fighting alongside Kyiv’s forces, setting fire to military registration and recruitment offices in Russia, and even making private phone calls to friends in Ukraine about moving there.

Ksenia Khavana, 33, was arrested in Yekaterinburg in February on charges of treason. She was accused of collecting money for the Ukrainian military. The Russian-American citizen had returned from Los Angeles to visit her family. The First Department said the charges related to a $51 donation to a U.S.-based charity that helps Ukraine.

According to experts, there are several factors that are prompting authorities to pursue more treason cases.

For one thing, the study sends a clear message that the unwritten rules have changed and that attending conferences abroad or collaborating with foreign colleagues is no longer something scientists should do, says Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and intelligence expert.

In addition, it is easier to persuade higher authorities to provide appropriate resources in a case of high treason, for example through surveillance or wiretapping, he says.

According to Smirnov, the surge in prosecutions occurred after the FSB allowed its regional branches to prosecute certain types of treason in 2022, and officers of those branches tried to curry favor with their superiors to advance their careers.

Most importantly, Soldatov said, is the FSB’s genuine and widespread belief in the “fragility of the regime” at a time of political unrest – be it due to mass protests like in 2011-12 or now during the war with Ukraine.

“They honestly believe it can break,” he said, even though that is not actually the case.

Mironova, the fiancée of the imprisoned journalist Safronov, shared this opinion.

FSB investigators believed they were catching “traitors” and “enemies of the fatherland” even though they knew they had no evidence against them, she said.