Russia’s FSB security service announced on Friday that U.S. citizen Eugene Spector was sentenced to 15 years in prison for stealing biotechnology secrets for the Pentagon.
“The American, acting in the interests of the Pentagon and a commercial organization affiliated with it, collected and transferred to a foreign party various information on biotechnological and biomedical topics, including those constituting state secrets, for the subsequent creation by the U.S. of a system of high-speed genetic screening of the Russian population,” the FSB said.
Russian media accounts of the trial did not indicate whether Spector pleaded guilty or innocent. The FSB usually announces when a defendant pleads guilty or confesses under interrogation.
Spector, born under the name Yevgeny Mironovich in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1972, moved to the United States and became an American citizen, but later moved back to Russia and became a top executive at a medical equipment conglomerate called the Medpolymerprom Group. The company specialized in producing cancer drugs.
In 2020, Spector was charged with facilitating bribes for Anastasia Aleseyeva, an aide to former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich. A Moscow court convicted him on bribery charges in 2021 and sentenced him to 3.5 years in prison, while Aleseyeva was sentenced to 12 years.
Spector was additionally charged with espionage in August 2023, although the details of those allegations have been kept secret until now. He was sentenced to 13 more years in prison by Moscow City Court in a closed-door trial on Tuesday, bringing his total sentence up to 15 years.
Olga Romanova, leader of a human rights group called Russia Behind Bars, told the New York Times (NYT) on Tuesday that Spector’s vague espionage charges and closed-door trial followed “exactly the same pattern” Russia has taken with other foreign nationals it planned to use for prisoner exchanges.
The Russians like to slap heavy prison sentences on such individuals right before trading them with foreign governments, to deflect accusations that they simply took convenient foreigners hostage. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, freed in a major prisoner exchange in August 2024, was an example of a captive who was loaded down with a heavy sentence for flimsy espionage charges right before he was released.
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