Ksenia Karelina, also known as Khavana, sits in a defendant’s cage at a court in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on June 20, 2024. Arrested for treason in Yekaterinburg upon his return from Los Angeles. The charges reportedly stemmed from a $51 donation she made to a U.S. charity helping Ukraine.
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TALLINN, Estonia — Maksim Kolker’s phone rang at 6 a.m. and the voice on the other end said his father had been arrested and he thought it was a scam to extort money. A day earlier, he had taken his father, the famous Russian physicist Dmitry Kolk, to the hospital in his hometown of Novosibirsk when his late-stage pancreatic cancer suddenly worsened.
The phone kept ringing and Kolker kept hanging up until finally his father called to confirm the horrific news. Later, the family learned that the elder Kolk had been charged with treason, a crime that was investigated and prosecuted in absolute secrecy in Russia and sentenced to a long prison term.
Over the past 30 years, treason cases have been rare in Russia, with several occurring every year. But since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the number of such cases, as well as espionage prosecutions, has surged, leaving citizens and foreigners alike stranded regardless of their political affiliation.
Compare this to the show trials of the 1930s under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Recent victims include Kremlin critics and independent journalists, as well as senior scientists working with countries Moscow considers friendly.
The cases add to an unprecedented crackdown on dissent under President Vladimir Putin. They are investigated almost entirely by the powerful Federal Security Service (FSB), and specific accusations and evidence are not always disclosed.
Defendants were often held in strict isolation at Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison, tried behind closed doors and almost always convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
In 2022, Putin urged security agencies to “severely suppress the actions of foreign intelligence services and promptly identify traitors, spies and saboteurs.”
Lawyer Evgeny Smirnov told The Associated Press that the First Ministry, a rights group that specializes in such prosecutions and takes its name from a branch of the security service, counted 100 in 2023. Several known cases of treason. He added that there were probably another 100 that no one knew about.
Smirnov said the longer the war lasted, the “more traitors” the authorities wanted to round up.
Treason cases began to rise after 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, vigorously supported a separatist insurgency in the east of the country and entered into a dispute with the West for the first time since the Cold War.
Two years ago, the legal definition of treason was expanded to include providing vaguely defined “aid” to a foreign country or organization, effectively making anyone who comes into contact with foreigners subject to prosecution.
The move follows massive anti-government protests in Moscow in 2011-12, which officials claimed were instigated by the West. The legal changes were harshly criticized by rights advocates, including the Presidential Commission on Human Rights.
Faced with criticism at the time, Putin promised to study the revised law and agreed that “there should not be any broad interpretation of what treason is.”
However, that’s exactly what started to happen.
In 2015, authorities arrested Svetlana Davydova, a mother of seven in the western Smolensk region, on treason charges under a new, expanded definition of the crime.
She is accused of contacting the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow in 2014 to warn officials there that she believed Russia was sending troops into eastern Ukraine, where a separatist insurgency against Kiev was unfolding.
The case drew national attention and outrage. Russia denied at the time that its troops were involved in eastern Ukraine, and many pointed to Davydova’s case as contradicting that assertion. The charges against her were eventually dropped.
This outcome was a rare exception to the growing number of cases of treason and espionage in subsequent years, which always ended in conviction and imprisonment.
US corporate security chief Paul Whelan was arrested in 2018 after traveling to Moscow to attend a wedding, and two years later was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to 16 years in prison. He denies the accusations.
Ivan Safronov, a Roscosmos consultant and former military journalist, was found guilty of treason in 2022 and sentenced to 22 years in prison. His prosecution is widely seen as retaliation for his reporting exposing military incidents and shady arms deals.
“This is a good warning to them that journalists should not write anything about the defense sector,” his fiancée and fellow journalist Ksenia Mironova told The Associated Press.
Russia’s FSB also pursues scientists who study aerodynamics, hypersonics and other areas that could be used in weapons development.
Attorney Smirnov said such arrests spiked after 2018, when Putin touted new, unique hypersonic weapons being developed by Russia in his annual State of the Union address.
In his view, this is the security services’ way of showing the Kremlin that Russian scientific progress, especially for the development of weapons, is so valuable that “all the foreign intelligence agencies in the world are following it.”
He emphasized that all the arrested scientists were civilians and “they never actually went after military scientists.”
Many scientists deny the accusations. Their families and colleagues insist they were implicated in benign events such as lecturing abroad or working with foreign scientists on joint projects.
Kolk, the son of a detained Novosibirsk physicist, said that when the Federal Security Service searched his father’s apartment, they looked for several briefing papers he had used for lectures in China.
The elder Kolk studied light waves and his lectures were approved for use abroad and were given in Russia. “Any student can understand that he did not reveal anything (secrets),” Maxim Kolk said.
Nonetheless, in 2022, FSB officials pulled the 54-year-old physicist from his hospital bed and flew him to Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, his son said.
The ailing scientist called his family on the plane to say goodbye because he knew he was unlikely to survive prison, his son said. Within days, the family received a telegram informing them that he had passed away in hospital.
Other cases are similar. Valery Golubkin, a 71-year-old Moscow physicist specializing in aerodynamics, was convicted of treason in 2023. His employer asked him to help with a project report.
Smirnov, who is part of the First Department team involved in his defense, said the reports were reviewed before being sent abroad and did not contain state secrets.
Golubkin’s daughter Lyudmila said the 2021 arrests were shocking.
“He didn’t commit any crime,” she said. Despite an appeal, his 12-year sentence was upheld and his family now hopes he will be released on parole.
In recent years, other scientists working on hypersonic technology, an important application area for missile development, have also been arrested on treason charges. One of them, 77-year-old Anatoly Maslov, was convicted in May and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
The Novosibirsk Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics wrote a letter supporting Maslov and two other physicists “to give lectures at international seminars and conferences, publish articles in highly rated journals (and) participate in international science project”. The letter said such activities are “a mandatory part of serious and high-quality scientific activity” whether in Russia or 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 making speeches critical of Russia in the West. Kara-Murza was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison after surviving what were believed to be attempts to poison him in 2015 and 2017, with his family concerned about his declining health.
In her closing arguments at the trial, Kara-Murza referred to the dark legacy of Soviet prosecutions, saying the country “has gone back to the 1930s.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Alvin Gershkovich was arrested on espionage charges in 2023, the first American journalist to be detained on such charges since the Cold War. Gershkovic, who went on trial in June, denies the charges and the U.S. government has declared he was wrongfully detained.
Russians have reportedly been charged with treason, or the lesser charge of “preparing for treason,” for actions including donating to Ukrainian charities or groups fighting alongside Kiev’s military, setting fire to Russian military recruitment offices, and even conducting Private phone conversation.
Ksenia Khavana, 33, was arrested in Yekaterinburg in February on treason charges and accused of collecting money for the Ukrainian military. The first department said the charges stemmed from a $51 donation to a U.S. charity helping Ukraine. The dual Russian-American citizen had returned from Los Angeles to visit family.
Experts say several factors are prompting authorities to pursue more treason cases.
One is that it sends a clear message that the unwritten rules have changed and holding meetings abroad or collaborating with foreign colleagues is no longer something scientists should do, said Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and security sector expert. Things to do.
He said it would also be easier to have higher authorities allocate resources to treason cases, such as surveillance or wiretapping.
Smirnov said prosecutions have surged since 2022 when the FSB allowed its regional branches to pursue certain treason charges, while officers in those branches try to curry favor with their superiors to advance their careers.
The bottom line, Soldatov said, is that Russia’s FSB has a sincere and widespread belief in “regime fragility” during times of political turmoil – whether from the mass protests of 2011-12 or now the war with Ukraine .
“They sincerely believed it would break,” he said, even if it didn’t.
Mironova, the fiancée of imprisoned journalist Safronov, echoed this sentiment.
She said Russia’s FSB investigators believed they were arresting “traitors” and “enemies of the fatherland” even though they knew there was no evidence against them.
