Just Like The USSR Russia is Jailing Their Scientists As Traitors

A photograph released by Russian state media showing President Vladimir V. Putin, center, overseeing the test of a new Russian hypersonic missile system, in Moscow in 2018.Credit...Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik, via Reuters

 The Problem is The World is not Ready to go Back!!

By Anton Troianovski

Reporting from Berlin

 

Russian scientists helped make their country a leader in developing cutting-edge missiles that fly at least five times as fast as the speed of sound. Then Russia started calling them traitors.

A Moscow court this week sentenced Alexander Shiplyuk, 57, the director of a Russian physics institute who specializes in hypersonic flight, to 15 years in prison for treason. Though the trial has been shrouded in secrecy, Mr. Shiplyuk’s advocates say he was accused of illegally sharing classified information. It was the latest step in a yearslong crackdown on some leading Russian physicists, a prong of the Russian government’s wide-ranging campaign of repression notable for its overlap with the country’s military industry.

Another senior scientist in Mr. Shiplyuk’s institute, the Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Siberia, was sentenced to 14 year in prison in May, and a third was arrested last year. At least eight other physicists working in fields related to hypersonic and supersonic flight have been arrested since 2015, according to Perviy Otdel, a group of Russian lawyers who specialize in treason and espionage cases.

The cases against the scientists have been kept under wraps, with hearings held behind closed doors. Mr. Shiplyuk’s lawyer said on Wednesday that he could not comment on his client’s case because it was “secret information.” 

But the scientists’ supporters say that the accusations against them stem from the sort of collaboration with colleagues abroad that is the lifeblood of their profession. They say that Russia’s F.S.B. security service, the main successor agency to the K.G.B., has waged a systematic campaign against Russian scientists who work in fields with sensitive military applications — a campaign that is likely to have a chilling effect on such research.

“We are not only afraid for the fate of our colleagues,” said an open letter from fellow scientists in defense of the Khristianovich institute’s scientists, published on its website in 2023 and later removed. “We simply do not understand how to continue doing our job.”

Mr. Shiplyuk and his two arrested co-workers, Anatoly Maslov and Valery Zvegintsev, were being investigated for “giving reports at international seminars and conferences, publishing articles in highly rated journals, and participating in international scientific projects,” the open letter said.

A man with white hair and a white mustache stands with his hands behind his back, with a man in a blue uniform standing behind him.


Anatoly Maslov, a physicist who was arrested in 2022 and accused of treason, at a court hearing in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May.Credit...Anton Vaganov/Reuters

The scientists’ work in aerodynamics has military applications — including hypersonic missiles — and also has civilian applications. Mr. Shiplyuk said in an interview for a 2021 book that what drew him to his work was “the desire to develop the aircraft of the future.” 

The reasoning behind the spate of arrests is murky, and the Kremlin has denied that they are part of any campaign of repression. Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with Perviy Otdel who has worked on other treason cases involving Russian physicists, said the F.S.B. appeared to be trying to deter any contact with foreigners and show that “intelligence agencies from all over the world are supposedly hunting for the achievements of Russian science.”

“It’s important to point out that these scientists were not working on weaponry,” Mr. Smirnov said. “They were conducting fundamental physical research, the results of which were supposed to be used in the civilian sphere.”

But the arrest of Mr. Shiplyuk and his colleagues has come as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has touted his country’s development of hypersonic missiles as core to Russia’s nuclear deterrent in its standoff with the United States. Hypersonic missiles are defined as being able to fly at five times the speed of sound or more, and also having some maneuverability, unlike ballistic missiles. The combination can allow them to evade air defenses.

Russia’s military has already used such missiles, which Mr. Putin unveiled in 2018, to deliver conventional warheads in the war against Ukraine.

It’s not clear where or how Mr. Shiplyuk and his colleagues were accused of sharing classified information. Reuters reported last year that Mr. Shiplyuk was suspected of doing so at a conference in China in 2017. Several other detained Russian scientists were also reported to have been accused of passing secrets to China, including Dmitri Kolker, a specialist in quantum optics, who died shortly after his arrest in 2022. 

Mr. Shiplyuk appeared at a leading scientific conference in Beijing as recently as 2019, and China has emerged as Russia’s most important international partner amid Western sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine. However, analysts say that the Kremlin still treats its Chinese partnership with caution and is wary of sharing its most advanced technology.

The New York Times