Vladivostok. September 6. INTERFAX - The press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov suggested that Vladimir Putin knows about the verdict of former journalist Ivan Safronov from media reports.
"I cannot tell you whether the president knows about this verdict, although I can assume with a high degree of confidence that he knows from media reports. I myself have no right to comment on this court decision," Peskov told reporters in Vladivostok on Tuesday.
On Monday, the Moscow City Court sentenced Safronov to 22 years in prison and a fine of 500 thousand rubles.
Since the materials of Safronov's case are classified and the trial against him was held in closed mode, only the introductory and operative parts of the verdict were announced by the court.
As reported, during the debate of the parties on August 30, the state prosecution asked the court to sentence Safronov to 24 years in a strict regime colony with restriction of liberty for two years, a fine of 500 thousand rubles and confiscation of funds that, according to investigators, he received criminally.
Safronov and his defense insisted on an acquittal.
The case was considered by a panel of three judges chaired by Judge Dmitry Gordeev.
Safronov was found guilty of two episodes of high treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The journalist, who remains in the position of advisor to the Director General of Roscosmos on information policy, was detained and imprisoned in July 2020.
As stated in the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, the investigation established and documented the facts of a long-term - from 2015 to 2019 - "finding out and collecting secret and top secret information by Safronov, including in relation to Russia's military-technical cooperation with states that are members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, as well as countries of the Middle East, Africa and The Balkan Peninsula".
According to the investigation, Safronov "systematically passed the collected information to representatives of foreign intelligence agencies, realizing that this information could be used by the member states of the NATO bloc against the security of the Russian Federation."
Safronov, according to the investigation, committed treason on a reimbursable basis, as well as using encryption methods.
In turn, according to the defense, according to the plot of the first episode presented to Safronov, the journalist in 2012 was recruited by a representative of the Czech secret service, to which in 2017 he passed secret information related to Russia's military-technical cooperation in Africa and the actions of the Russian Armed Forces in the Middle East. The final recipient of the secret information, according to investigators, was the United States.
In addition, the defense stated, the investigation believes that in December 2015 Safronov, for $248, handed over to the political scientist Demuri Voronin, who has dual citizenship of Russia and Germany, information about the activities of the Russian Armed Forces in Syria, which he, in turn, forwarded to representatives of the University of Zurich of Switzerland and the BND (Federal Intelligence Service) of Germany. The investigation insists that this information could have been used to analyze the actions of Russian troops in Syria.
Safronov pleads not guilty and believes that the criminal case is connected with his journalistic activities. Twice, as his defenders noted, the journalist refused to make a deal with the investigation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated that the persecution of Safronov is not related to his journalistic activities.
Prior to working at Roscosmos, Safronov was a correspondent for the Kommersant and Vedomosti newspapers, specializing, in particular, on the topic of the military-industrial complex and the space industry.