By Galina Korol | 2024-09-23

KYIV -- Prominent Russian scientists who helped developed Russia's much-touted hypersonic missiles have become the latest victims of the Kremlin's hypocrisy and infighting.

The Moscow city court on September 3 sentenced physicist Alexander Shiplyuk to 15 years in a penal colony after finding him guilty of "state treason" -- the latest prison term for a scientist accused of sharing state secrets.

Shiplyuk, 57, the director of the Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, was arrested in summer 2022 and has since been held in Moscow's Lefortovo prison.

The court found Shiplyuk guilty of two instances of state treason in a closed-door trial, with few details of the case against him made public, TASS news agency reported.

Russian media has reported that Shiplyuk was accused of handing information on Russian hypersonic weapons to foreign representatives.

TASS said Shiplyuk did not admit guilt.

Several high-profile scientists have been arrested in recent years, with at least three detained since Moscow launched the full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022.

Shiplyuk's colleague from the same institute, Anatoly Maslov, also arrested around that time, was sentenced to 14 years in May this year, also on treason charges.

Russian media said he was accused of passing classified data related to Russia's hypersonic missile programme to German intelligence.

Chief researcher Valery Zvegintsev, who founded and headed the institute's laboratory studying high-speed aerodynamics and gas dynamics, was also arrested in April 2023.

Pressure on scientists

Moscow has for years put pressure on scientists and arrested a string of academics -- a trend that intensified since it launched its Ukraine offensive and amid increased paranoia within the regime.

Researchers who work with the global scientific world appear to have the highest risk of running afoul of Russia's security services.

Shiplyuk was accused of passing secret information to China at a scientific conference held there in 2017, while Zvegintsev was arrested following the publication of a scientific article in an Iranian journal, according to media reports.

Legal analysts have raised questions over the allegations.

Of the more than 10 researchers at various Russian institutes who have been convicted of treason in recent years, all worked with public sources and studied fundamental physics, they say.

"In principle, information from public sources cannot be secret. However, this does not stop criminal cases from being initiated," said Olga Kurnosova, an analyst and opposition Russian politician.

"Basically, like everything in today's Russia, its relationship to law is quite conditional," she told Kontur.

"They are imprisoning physicists who are researching not weapons, but rather ordinary physical processes," said Evgeny Smirnov, a human rights activist with Department One, an association of lawyers and human rights activists.

"The results of this research can be used anywhere -- to make household appliances and civil aircraft, and they can be used to make weapons," said Smirnov, who previously defended Russians accused of treason before being forced to leave Russia in 2021.

Materials published in international journals or sent to foreign colleagues by Russian scientists are thoroughly checked by a special expert commission to determine whether they contain restricted information, he added.

"Logically, why should people be charged if before sending these papers they came and officially asked whether they could send them?"

'Thieves in power'

The fact that the crackdown has centered on scientists who worked on research underpinning Russia's hypersonic missiles has also raised eyebrows.

The arrests of the scientists began the same year President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia possessed hypersonic weapons, which are capable of traveling at extremely high speeds and can alter their course mid-flight to evade air defenses.

Despite Russia's claims of the missiles' "invincibility", Ukrainian forces have said they have downed such weapons.

Smirnov expressed skepticism about the recent cases.

"It seems to me that no information was leaked," said Smirnov.

"I have a feeling that all this was done for several purposes, including demonstrating to the country's authorities that intelligence services around the world are seeking to obtain Russian 'innovations' in this area and to show that Russia has weapons that are unmatched anywhere in the world," he told Kontur.

"A second purpose is to create a certain atmosphere in the scientific community -- an atmosphere of fear when communicating with foreign colleagues," he said.

Russian security services identified and chose "ideal victims" who had corresponded with foreign colleagues, according to Smirnov.

He also noted that there were no such victims at military institutes because they wanted to avoid anyone who actually worked on the weapons.

Kurnosova gave another potential reason as to why the physicists were ensnared.

"My hypothesis is that when it became clear in practice that missile specifications were completely different from what was reported, [the authorities] began to look for a scapegoat, and the easiest thing to do is find a scapegoat among scientists," she said.

"They can't say that all the money was stolen and the tests were faked, so they have to say that the scientists are to blame and sold everything to the Chinese."

"This is such a simple and convenient excuse for the thieves in power," she added.