Ksenia Karelina, also known by her surname Khavana, sits in a defendant’s cage at a courthouse in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on June 20, 2024. The Russian-born U.S. citizen was arrested on treason charges in Yekaterinburg in February after returning from Los Angeles to visit relatives. The charges allegedly stem from her $51 donation to a U.S. charity helping Ukraine.
Archive photo/AP
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Archive photo/AP
TALLINN, Estonia — When Maksim Kolker’s phone rang at 6 a.m. and the voice on the other end said his father had been arrested, he thought it was a blackmail scam. The day before, he had taken his father, prominent Russian physicist Dmitry Kolker, to the hospital in his hometown of Novosibirsk, when his terminal pancreatic cancer suddenly took a turn for the worse.
The phone kept ringing and Kolker kept hanging up until his father finally called to confirm the terrifying news. The family later learned that the elder Kolker had been charged with treason, a crime that is investigated and prosecuted in total secrecy in Russia and carries a lengthy prison sentence.
Treason cases have been rare in Russia for the past 30 years, with a handful each year. But since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, they have skyrocketed, along with espionage prosecutions, ensnaring citizens and foreigners alike, regardless of their political views.
It was reminiscent of the trials under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s.
Recent victims have ranged from Kremlin critics and independent journalists to veteran scientists working with countries Moscow considers friendly.
These cases stand out from the crackdown on dissent that has reached unprecedented levels under President Vladimir Putin. They are investigated almost exclusively by the powerful Federal Security Service, or FSB, with specific allegations and evidence not always disclosed.
The accused are often held in strict isolation in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison, tried behind closed doors and almost always sentenced to long prison terms.
In 2022, Putin urged security agencies to “vigorously suppress the activities of foreign intelligence agencies, quickly identify traitors, spies and saboteurs”.
First Department, a human rights group that specializes in such prosecutions and takes its name from a section of the security service, counted more than 100 known treason cases in 2023, lawyer Evgeny Smirnov told The Associated Press. He added that there were probably another 100 that no one knew about.
The longer the war drags on, the more the authorities want to arrest “more traitors,” Smirnov said.
Treason cases began to rise after 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, supported a separatist insurgency in the country’s east and fell out 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 “assistance” to foreign states or organizations, effectively making it possible to prosecute anyone who comes into contact with foreigners.
The move followed mass anti-government protests in Moscow in 2011-12 that officials said were instigated by the West. The changes to the law were heavily criticised by rights advocates, including those on the Presidential Human Rights Council.
Faced with criticism at the time, Putin promised to review the amended law and agreed that “there should not be any broad interpretation of treason”.
But that’s exactly what has started to happen.
In 2015, authorities arrested Svetlana Davydova, a mother of seven from the western Smolensk region, on charges of treason under a newly expanded definition of the crime.
She was charged with contacting the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow in 2014 to warn officials there that she thought Russia was sending troops into eastern Ukraine, where a separatist uprising against Kyiv was taking place.
The case attracted national attention and public outrage. At the time, Russia denied its military involvement in eastern Ukraine, and many pointed out that the case against Davydova contradicted that narrative. The charges against her were eventually dropped.
That outcome was a rare exception among the series of treason and espionage cases that followed in the following years, which consistently ended in convictions and imprisonment.
Paul WhelanA US corporate security executive who traveled to Moscow for a wedding was arrested in 2018 and convicted of espionage two years later, and sentenced to 16 years in prison. He has denied the charges.
Ivan Safronov, an adviser to the Roscosmos space agency and a former military journalist, was convicted of treason in 2022 and sentenced to 22 years in prison. His prosecution was widely seen as retaliation for his reporting exposing military failures and shady arms deals.
“This is a very good cautionary tale that journalists should not write anything about the defense sector,” his fiancee and fellow reporter, Ksenia Mironova, told the AP.
The FSB also pursues scientists working on aerodynamics, hypersonic technology and other areas that could be used in weapons development.
According to lawyer Smirnov, such arrests increased after 2018, when Putin in his annual state-of-the-nation address praised new and unique hypersonic weapons that Russia was developing.
In his view, this is how the security agencies demonstrate to the Kremlin that Russia’s scientific advances, especially those used to develop weapons, are so valuable that “all foreign intelligence agencies in the world are pursuing them.”
He stressed that all the captured scientists were civilians and “they practically never go after military scientists”.
Many scientists have denied the allegations. Their families and colleagues insist they were implicated for something as innocuous as giving lectures abroad or working with foreign scientists on joint projects.
Kolker, the son of the detained Novosibirsk physicist, said that when the FSB searched his father’s apartment, they found several presentations that he had used in lectures in China.
The elder Kolker, who studied light waves, gave presentations that were authorized for use abroad and also presented within Russia, and “any student could understand that he did not reveal anything (secret) in those presentations,” Maksim Kolker said.
However, FSB officers dragged the 54-year-old physicist from his hospital bed in 2022 and took him to Moscow, to Lefortovo Prison, his son said.
The ailing scientist called his family from the plane to say goodbye, knowing he was unlikely to survive in prison, his son said. A few days later, the family received a telegram saying he had died in hospital.
Other cases are similar. Valery Golubkin, a 71-year-old physicist specializing in aerodynamics in Moscow, was convicted of treason in 2023. His state-run research institute was working on an international project for a supersonic airliner, and he was asked by the company to help write a report on it.
Smirnov of the First Section, who participated in his defense, said the reports were checked before being sent abroad and did not contain state secrets.
Golubkin’s daughter, Lyudmila, said the 2021 arrest was shocking.
“He is innocent,” she said. His 12-year prison sentence has been upheld despite an appeal, and his family is now hoping he will be released on bail.
Other scientists working on hypersonics, a field with important applications in missile development, have also been arrested on treason charges in recent years. One of them, Anatoly Maslov, 77, was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison in May.
The Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Novosibirsk wrote a letter in support of Maslov and two other physicists accused of “presenting at international seminars and conferences, publishing articles in highly regarded journals (and) participating in international scientific projects”. The letter said such activities were “a mandatory component of conscientious and high-quality scientific activity”, both in Russia and 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 giving speeches critical of Russia in the West. After surviving what he believed were attempts on his life in 2015 and 2017, Kara-Murza was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison, where his family feared for his deteriorating health.
In his closing statement, Kara-Murza alluded to the dark legacy of the Soviet prosecutions, saying the country had “returned to the 1930s”.
The Wall Street Journal Evan Gershkovich was arrested in 2023 on espionage charges, the first American reporter to be detained on such charges since the Cold War. Gershkovich, who went on trial in June, has denied the charges and the US government has claimed he was wrongfully detained.
Russians have reportedly been charged with treason — or the less serious crime of “preparing for treason” — for actions that include donating money to Ukrainian charities or groups fighting alongside Kyiv forces, burning down military recruitment offices in Russia, and even privately talking on the phone to friends in Ukraine about moving there.
Ksenia Khavana, 33, was arrested in Yekaterinburg in February on treason charges, allegedly collecting money for the Ukrainian military. The Russian-born U.S. citizen was returning from Los Angeles to visit family, and the Justice Department said the charges stemmed from a $51 donation to a U.S.-based charity that helps Ukraine.
Experts say there are several factors driving the government to pursue more treason cases.
One is that it sends a clear message that the unwritten rules have changed and that conferences abroad or working with foreign colleagues are no longer something scientists should do, said Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and expert on security agencies.
It is also easier to ask higher authorities to allocate resources to a treason case, such as surveillance or wiretapping, he said.
The surge in prosecutions came after the FSB allowed its regional branches in 2022 to prosecute certain types of treason, and officials at those branches sought to curry favor with their superiors to advance their careers, according to Smirnov.
Above all, Soldatov said, it is the FSB’s sincere and widespread belief in the “fragility of the regime” at times of political upheaval — either from mass protests, as in 2011-12, or now in the war with Ukraine.
“They really believed it could break,” he said, even though it didn’t.
Mironova, the fiancee of imprisoned journalist Safronov, agrees.
FSB investigators thought they were catching “traitors” and “enemies of the fatherland,” even though they knew there was no evidence against them, she said.
