Global Courant 2023-05-24 15:20:00
By Filipp Lebedev, Lucy Papachristou and Mark Trevelyan
LONDON (Reuters) – The director of a top Russian science institute, arrested on suspicion of treason, along with two other hypersonic missile technology experts, is accused of betraying secrets to China, two people familiar with the case told Reuters .
Alexander Shiplyuk, head of the Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM) in Siberia, is suspected of handing over classified materials at a 2017 scientific conference in China, the sources said.
The 56-year-old maintains his innocence and insists the information in question was not classified and was freely available online, according to the people Reuters chose not to identify to ensure their safety.
“He is convinced that the information was not classified, and of his own innocence,” said one of the people.
The nature of the allegations against the ITAM director, who was arrested last August, has not been previously reported. The Chinese connection would make Shiplyuk the latest in a string of Russian scientists arrested in recent years for allegedly betraying secrets to Beijing.
Asked about the allegations faced by the ITAM experts and past cases of treason related to China, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said security services were vigilant for possible cases related to “betrayal of the motherland “.
“This is very important work,” he added. “It’s constantly going on and it’s hardly possible to talk about any trend here.”
The FSB security service did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
When asked about allegations that Beijing had targeted Russian scientists to obtain sensitive research, China’s foreign ministry said Sino-Russian relations are based on “non-alignment, non-confrontation and non-targeting of third parties.”
“This is fundamentally different from what some military and intelligence alliances have put together based on their Cold War mindset,” it added.
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President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that Russia is a world leader in hypersonic missiles, advanced weapons that can carry payloads up to 10 times faster than sound to punch through air defense systems.
The ITAM cases, as well as past treason arrests, suggest that Moscow is vigilant about losing any technological edge, including to China, an ally on which it has become increasingly dependent for political and trade support since its invasion of Ukraine 15 months ago.
Last year, laser specialist Dmitry Kolker was arrested in Siberia on charges of treason, but died of cancer two days later. His lawyer Alexander Fedulov told Reuters last week that Kolker was accused of passing secrets to China, a claim the scientist’s family denied.
Alexander Lukanin, a scientist from the Siberian city of Tomsk, was arrested in 2020 on suspicion of passing technical secrets to Beijing, Russia’s state news agency TASS reported at the time. Last year he was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
Valery Mitko, a scientist who heads the Arctic Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, was also accused in 2020 of passing secrets to China, where he had regularly traveled to give lectures, TASS said at the time. He died two years later at the age of 81 while under house arrest.
‘VERY SERIOUS ALLEGATIONS’
Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s parliament last month voted to increase the maximum sentence for treason to 20 years in prison. On Tuesday, the head of Russia’s lower house of security committee supported a bill tightening access to state secrets, saying 48 Russians had been convicted of treason between 2017 and 2022.
The cases facing Shiplyuk and his two ITAM colleagues – Anatoly Maslov and Valery Zvegintsev – are top secret and will be tried behind closed doors. A hearing in the Maslov case, the first of the three arrested in June last year, was scheduled to take place in Saint Petersburg on Wednesday.
Zvegintsev was detained last month. The investigation into the three scientists made world headlines last week when their colleagues at ITAM signed an open letter in support of them, complaining that it was impossible for scientists to do their jobs if they risked being arrested for writing of articles or giving presentations at international conferences. .
The letter rejected the idea that the three had betrayed secrets, saying that any material they published or presented had been thoroughly checked to ensure they were not secret.
Kremlin spokesman Peskov, who was asked by reporters about the open letter last week, said: “We have indeed seen this call, but Russian special services are working on it. They are doing their job. These are very serious allegations.”
ITAM, located at the Academgorodok science campus near the city of Novosibirsk, says on its website that it is registered as part of the Russian military-industrial complex. The institute has had extensive international ties, including contacts with companies, universities and research centers around the world, according to a 2020 online document outlining its work.
One of the institutions mentioned was the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center (CARDC), whose website contains several reports of experimental breakthroughs related to fighter jets and hypersonic missiles.
The CARDC site lists the director of the center as Wang Xunnian. According to two official Chinese local government websites, Wang is a major general in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
A Reuters review of publicly available Chinese academic papers shows that the center’s researchers have co-authored dozens of papers in recent years with colleagues who work in institutes directly run by the PLA.
The CARDC did not respond to questions emailed to the center and Wang, while Reuters was unable to contact Wang directly.
‘SHOCKED AND ADVERTISED’
Reuters interviewed two American scientists, one of whom knew Maslov and the other Shiplyuk. They said the Russians were bona fide academics, even though their field of study was sensitive because of its military applications.
Stuart Laurence, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland, said he had met Shiplyuk twice, including at a 2012 conference in Tours, France, where the Russian scientist presented a paper with Maslov.
“I was shocked and shocked to see him arrested,” said Laurence, who last exchanged emails with Shiplyuk in January 2021. “He was highly respected in his field.”
George Nacouzi, senior aerospace engineer at RAND Corp, said China has been “catching up” with the US and Russia in hypersonic technology in recent years.
He stressed that the three arrested Russians were only involved in one part of the work required to build a hypersonic missile, a process that also includes the integration of sensors, navigation systems and propulsion.
“It’s a long road. Just doing the basic research won’t get you a rocket,” Nacouzi said.
(Additional reporting by Eduardo Baptista and Ryan Woo in Beijing; Written by Mark Trevelyan in London; Edited by Mike Collett-White and Pravin Char)
