Former journalist Ivan Safronov spent more than two years in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison belonging to the FSB Secret Service. He never saw freedom for the next 22 years. According to TASS agencies, this is the toughest treason sentence ever handed down in Russia.
The Moscow Public Prosecutor’s Office initially asked Ivan Saffron to serve a two-year harsh sentence. At the same time, the prosecution could not prove that Safronov received money from the Czech Republic. In addition, according to investigators, documents representing state secrets were published on the Internet. The case seems bizarre, featuring an alleged Western intelligence officer with an obscene nickname, claims that the Czech Republic is a client state of the United States, and the incompetence of Russian military experts.
In court on Tuesday, prosecutor Elvira Zochkova offered to reduce Safronov’s sentence to 12 years in exchange for a confession. However, the accused journalist refused.he made it his Lawyer Evgeny Smirnovhas appealed the judgment. The 32-year-old Safronov denies his guilt, stressing that he only engaged in journalism and had no access to state secrets.
In addition to the sentence of serving time in a strict penal colony, the court fined the Kommersant and Vedmosti correspondents, former advisers of the space agency Roscosmos, 500,000 rubles, equivalent to 204,000 crowns.
Investigators sought confessions from Safronov and his alleged collaborators. Political scientist Dmitry Voronin worked up a sweat for this in the spring of 2021 in the office of his FSB investigator Alexander Shaban, who specializes in high treason and espionage. The offer was clear. If he admits to selling classified information that he was supposed to receive from Safronov, he will be sentenced to less than a quarter of a century in prison.
Voronin lived in Germany for a long time, where he sold his analysis on Russia to Western companies. They were written by Russian journalists, including Safronov. Trying to get a lighter sentence, he accepted the investigator’s offer. I have confirmed that the German agent is indeed there. Neither Chavan nor he SVR seems to know German. The word he desperately coined is onanist slang.
Roscosmos employee arrested
Born into a family of journalists, Safronov has worked every day at Kommersant, from intern to cosmonaut, weapons industry and military correspondent.However, he was fired in 2019 per article, in which he wrote about the possible resignation of Valentina Matvizhenko from the post of President of the Senate of the Russian Parliament. One of the wealthiest oligarchs in the United States has fired the author of an article. In protest, nearly all of the internal political editors then left.
The young editor then moved to the economic daily Vedomosti. However, six months later, the newspaper was bought by the organization of the Rosneft oil company, and Safronov left journalism. Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, hired him as a communications expert. However, a few months later, Safronov was arrested by FSB agents while trying to leave the apartment, and since then he has been in Lefortovo.
According to the text of the indictment, “Safronov discovered state secrets and handed them over to agents of two foreign intelligence agencies under the pretext of journalistic activity guided by profit-seeking intentions.” increase Proekt.media Serverwho won the charge.
Investigators said he had built an extensive network of collaborators for his anti-state activities. In addition to the above mentioned Voronin, who was supposed to pass on the secret to his commander under the codename Onanista, he is said to have sold the information to Czech citizen Martin Laris. From his 2012 until he was in 2014, he was in Moscow as a correspondent for Lidovénoviny. After he returned to the Czech Republic, he tried to launch a paid service with analytical materials on Russia and Eastern Europe. According to the accusations, it was just a front for Czech intelligence services.
Czech clutches and secret information
Claims that Laris was in fact a Czech intelligence agent were substantiated in an indictment in the opinion of the Russian intelligence agency SVR, but without further details. The indictment further states that the information was sent directly from the Czech Republic to the United States. The documents also include the expertise of his FSB employee under the pseudonym Vladimir Sharapov. He wrote that the information “corresponded to the intelligence objectives of the North Atlantic Alliance” and flowed directly to Washington. According to Sharapov, the Czech Republic is “a vassal of the United States, the main participant in the NATO bloc.”
Investigators claim that classified information was sent to the West in seven files, six to an address in Larisch and one to Voronin, Germany. All of them were related to Russia’s military-technical cooperation with Libya, Algeria, Serbia, states of the former Soviet Union, and Russia’s participation in the war in Syria.
A lawyer for the convicted Safronov said the journalist repeatedly asked investigators to borrow a laptop with internet access. He wanted to show them that it was data from a public source, not classified information. But investigators wouldn’t let him do that.
A journalist from Proekt.media conducted an investigation on his behalf and found exactly the same information on the Internet in six cases. In one case, details were found in Safronov’s documents published just a month later.
But even here, the accusation has its odd moments. Ruslan Putchev, a well-known military expert and member of the Advisory Board of the Ministry of Defense of Russia, said that detailed data on the supply of Russian military equipment to the countries of the former Soviet Union are not of interest to ordinary readers. , it is espionage. However, the lawyer pointed out that the client obtained these data from the pages of the magazine Export vámá, of which Puchov is the editor-in-chief.
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