100 convictions and just one acquittal. A new study looks at the past 20 years of Russia's treason and espionage cases.
The human rights group Team 29 has released a new report about every known treason and espionage case in Russia’s criminal justice system over the past 20 years. An association of human rights lawyers and journalists, Team 29 has also provided legal assistance to several suspects in these trials. Meduza summarizes the report’s main findings.
In the past 20 years, Russia has convicted roughly 100 people of treason and espionage, 278 people of disclosing state secrets, and five people of illegally accessing state secrets. According to Team 29, Russian citizens are charged with treason, foreigners are charged with espionage, people with access to classified information are charged with disclosing state secrets, and anyone without this access is charged with illegally obtaining state secrets (this final offense was only formally criminalized in 2012). Punishable by up to 20 years in prison, treason and espionage are the most serious of these crimes.
Of everyone charged with treason or espionage in Russia over the past two decades, courts have acquitted just one man and dismissed cases against another three suspects: Svetlana Davydova, Nikolai Panasevich, and Sergey Minakov. According to Team 29, the secrecy of treason and espionage cases exacerbates the accusatory bias of Russia’s criminal justice system. Whenever an independent lawyer finds their way into one of these trials, they often say the charges are flimsy and accuse investigators and judges of violating their clients’ right to due process.
In at least 23 cases involving treason or espionage charges, state-appointed lawyers or private counsels committed actions that harmed their clients, according to Team 29’s research. Attorneys usually urged defendants to confess and cooperate with investigators, also waiting too long to file necessary appellate paperwork. The report cites an interview with the singer Vladimir Martynenko, who says he signed the first sheet of paper police handed him, “without even reading it,” on the advice of his lawyer, Elena Lebedeva-Romanova. (The same attorney also defended former GRU officer Sergey Skripal, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison, before he was later swapped and sent to Britain, where he was famously poisoned in March 2018.)
In at least 19 treason and espionage cases, state investigators apparently tried to falsify evidence — for example, by backdating documents, classifying shared information retroactively, or refusing to consult competent, independent experts and relying instead on “pocket” specialists. Team 29 cites the cases against Anatoly Babkin and Valentin Danilov, where the same expert witnesses were called, though one case concerned satellite electrification and the other dealt with the movement of an underwater vessel in an air pocket.
Russian laws are designed in such a way that the list of state secrets itself is classified. Without access to this classified data, defendants often have no idea what constitutes a state secret. According to Team 29’s report, at least 21 people convicted of treason in the past two decades didn’t even have access to state secrets. In trials dealing with classified information, moreover, the case materials can be treated as state secrets, prohibiting lawyers from familiarizing themselves with the evidence against their clients. Convictions and sentences are often classified, too, even though these records can’t be secret, because convicts are supposed to be able to challenge their verdicts.
People convicted of treason or espionage are often sentenced to punishments “below the minimum.” Team 29 believes this is because judges frequently have doubts about suspects’ guilt, but investigators’ charges effectively guarantee a conviction in Russia’s justice system, meaning that the role of judges is reduced to choosing the defendant's penalty. Convicts in at least 39 treason and espionage cases received first-instance court sentences below the legal minimum, including two probation sentences. Since entering the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, “guided by the principles of humanism,” has pardoned at least 17 treason or espionage convicts (later exchanging 12 of these people).
At the same time, Russian legislation criminalizing treason, espionage, and the disclosure of state secrets has only gotten tougher. In 2008, defendants lost the right to demand jury trials, where the acquittal rate was twice as high. In 2012, federal criminal codes against these offenses were expanded to include language about “other cases,” “other assistance,” and the phrase “Russia’s external security” was replaced with the vaguer wording “Russia’s security.” Team 29’s researchers believe that virtually any kind of help rendered to a foreign citizen can now be prosecuted as a crime against the Russian state.
Russia tends to prosecute people for treason and espionage in accordance with Moscow’s foreign policy, Team 29 argues. Of roughly 100 cases, 18 involve allegations of spying for the United States, and 17 cases relate to spying for China. Involved in 26 different cases, the leader here, however, is the tiny country of Georgia. All treason and espionage cases involving Georgia were launched after the five-day war in August 2008, and punishments in at least 13 of these trials were below the minimum sentence provided by law. Team 29 also says there’s been a similar spike in treason and espionage cases related to Ukraine, leading to four convictions since 2014, with another four now in progress.
Summary by Olga Korelina, translation by Kevin Rothrock
The years in question
1997-2017. Team 29 decided to start with 1997 because this was the year Russia implemented its first post-Soviet criminalization of treason. To gather data for this study, Team 29 studied more than 300 news media publications, more than 50 case files on court websites and the “Justice” federal database, and conducted 22 interviews with convicts, their relatives, and their lawyers.
The Alexander Nikitin case
Nikitin worked for the Russian Defense Ministry until 1992, and later started collaborating with the Bellona Foundation international environmental group, co-authoring a report that featured details about nuclear incidents in the Soviet and Russian navies. Though the study was based on open-source information, federal prosecutors charged Nikitin with treason and the disclosure of state secrets. In 2000, Russia’s Supreme Court acquitted him.
The Svetlana Davydova case
In 2014, a woman living in Vyazma named Svetlana Davydova overheard a soldier talking about his unit being deployed on a mission. Davydova believed that he was talking about being sent to eastern Ukraine, and she called to warn the Ukrainian embassy. Prosecutors claimed that this constituted the disclosure of state secrets. In 2015, however, the case was dismissed on the grounds that no crime had been committed, after an expert analysis failed to verify the information Davydova provided to Ukrainian diplomats.
The Nikolai Panasevich case
A soldier from Murmansk, Nikolai Panasevich was accused of treason in 2014. He spent about five months in pretrial detention before the charges were dropped. That’s all that’s known about his case.
The Sergey Minakov case
A sailor in Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, Sergey Minakov was detained in 2015 in Crimea on suspicion of forwarding text messages seven years earlier, while aboard a civilian vessel, to the Ukrainian National Security Service about the locations of Russian warships. That same year, the charges were dropped on the grounds that no crime had been committed.
Russian courts have an accusatory bias?
Acquittals in Russia are incredibly rare. In 2017, for example, just 0.02 percent of all trial verdicts were not guilty.
The Vladimir Martynenko case
Investigators say Martynenko brought a flash drive containing state secrets to China. The singer says he didn’t know what was on the flash drive. In 2011, he was sentenced to seven years in prison, but he was released on early parole after just four years. Martynenko says he may have been targeted with treason charges because he refused to work with Russia's Federal Security Service in the early 2000s.
The Anatoly Babkin case
Professor Anatoly Babkin worked on the hydrodynamics of the “Skval” Russian torpedo at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University. As part of the school’s agreement with the University of Pennsylvania, Babkin transferred data about the torpedo to his American colleague. Investigators later determined that some of this information contained state secrets (even though both Babkin’s supervisors and the university’s curator from Russia’s intelligence community had approved the materials). In 2003, Babkin was convicted of treason and sentenced to eight years of probation.
The Valentin Danilov case
Physicist Valentin Danilov worked at the Krasnoyarsk State Technical University, researching space technologies. After he shared data with colleagues in China, federal investigators accused him of disclosing state secrets, while his attorneys argued that the information in question had been declassified in 1992. In the end, Danilov was sentenced to 13 years in prison for treason. He went free on early parole in 2012.
The air pocket
An artificial layer of air under extreme pressure that insulates the torpedo shell from contact with the water.