Article 1 eurasia insight tbilisi claims russian troop movements in response to spy dispute diana Petriashvili 9/29/06

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The FSB public relations department told Itar-Tass on Monday that Oyamaye had collaborated with British and Estonian secret services. He was arrested last March on charges of high treason (<espionage>). Court hearings into the spy case against Oyamaye ended on April 20.

Valery Oyamaye - ex-officer of the Russian secret services, was recruited in Tallinn by British intelligence agent Pablo Miller who had been first secretary of the British Embassy in Estonia.

Oyamaye's bosses were particularly interested in information about the staff of the Russian foreign intelligence service, its activities abroad, information about FSB, FAPSI federal agency of governmental information and communication, Russian intelligence agents in British secret services, <Russia>'s leading politicians and ways of establishing contact with them.

Oyamaye has been incriminated in collecting and selling classified information, which was <Russia's state secrets, to foreign intelligence agents.

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A source at the court said Thursday the first hearing in the courtroom has been scheduled for March 13.

Colonel Alexander Zaporozhny, Ret., will stand trial under Article 275 of <Russia>'s Criminal Code stipulating punishment for high treason in the form of <espionage>, the source said.

Officers at the court's press service confirmed Col Zaporozhny is accused of leaking classified data, but they declined from any further comments before an official announcement of the verdict

Other sources indicate Col Zaporozhny leaked information on the activity of <Russia's secret services and thus inflicted damage on national security.

The man is now kept at Moscow's Lefortovo custody. He is due to stand a trial in closed sessions.

American Bliss detained on suspicion of espionage> in <Russia>.

By Olga Semyonova

MOSCOW, December 1 (Itar-Tass) -- Richard L. Bliss, an American national working for the Qualcoumm Co., was detained by Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers in South European <Russia>'s Rostov region on November 25 on suspicion of <espionage>, sources in the Federal Security Service's head office in Moscow told Itar-Tass today.

The FSB sources said Bliss had been found using special satellite receivers illegally brought into <Russia to conduct topography-and geodesy survey work.

The investigation department of the FSB regional office in Rostov has instituted criminal proceedings against the American national under Article 276 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

Author: By Andrei Popov

HELSINKI, May 10 (Itar-Tass) -A Finnish defense officer accused of spying for <Russia> served in a special department of the Finnish armed forces in Vaasa, Helsinki-based sources said on Thursday.

A court hearing on this <espionage> case will be held in Finland on May 28-29. The main headquarters of the Finnish defense forces noticed a leakage of military secrets early this spring. The facts were handed over to Finland's security police whose Chief Seppo Nevala has confirmed that an inquiry into the case is under way.

The Finnish side, including the military agency, has not commented <espionage reports so far. Finland does not know for sure what type of classified information was handed over to the Russian side.

Author: Igor Kritsky

KRASNOYARSK, September 20 (Itar-Tass) -- The territorial court banned the disclosure of details in the case against physicist Valentin Danilov who is accused of <espionage> for China and fraud, lawyer Yelena Yevmenova said on Monday.

According to her, the court has taken the measure in order to fully observe the rule of court. "The court imposed a strict ban for disclosing the details of this case," the lawyer emphasized.

Defendant Danilov said after the court session that "the judge is seeking to do its best for the trial to be held according to the law, and the ruling would be final and not subject to appeal."

The former director of the thermophysical centre is accused of passing to a Chinese company of some information constituting state secrets. Under an order of the Chinese side he has made the stand at which the impact of space on artificial satellites of the Earth can be modeled. The Federal Security Service regional department arrested the physicist in the beginning of 2001 and he has been on recognizance since September 2003. The jury considered the guilt of the defendant unproved on December 29, 2003 and acquitted him that the prosecutor's office of the Krasnoyarsk territory appealed. The Supreme Court of <Russia vacated the acquittal verdict to Danilov on July 23 and sent the case for repeated consideration with a new composition of court.

The next court session will be held on September 22.

Author: By Sergei Bodanov

MOSCOW, December 6 (Itar-Tass) - The Moscow city court will have new hearings on the case of former diplomat Valentin Moiseyev, who is charged with espionage> in favor of South Korea, on Wednesday.

The trial was nearing completion and Moiseyev was expected to make the final statement when an ailment of judge Tatiana Gubanova came and the hearings were started anew. The lawyers protested against that at the Supreme Court, and Moiseyev asked the Supreme Court to discuss his case in <Russia>'s highest judicial instance.

Moiseyev, the then deputy director of the Russian foreign ministry's first Asian department, was detained by the Federal Security Service in summer 1998 and accused of <espionage.

He was sentenced to 12 years in custody by the Moscow city court in December 1999, but the Supreme Court annulled the sentence on July 25 and sent the case back for a new consideration. The trial has been on since September 5.

Author: By Sergei Bodanov

MOSCOW, January 16 (Itar-Tass) -- The judicial board for appeals at the Supreme Court of <Russia> will consider on Tuesday an appeal lodged by the lawyers of former Russian diplomat Platon Obukhov, sentenced to 11 years in prison on charges of <espionage for British Mi-6 intelligence.

A son of a high-ranking Russian diplomat, Obukhov, 28, was arrested by the federal security service (FSS) in April 1995. According to the FSS, Obukhov was enlisted as an agent of the British intelligence in July 1995, and since then, furnished his British employers with information of state secrecy grading he had access to as a staff diplomat at the Foreign Ministry.

A trial at the Moscow city court went on for almost three years. The counsel for the defence insisted on that Obukhov had serious mental problems, and vindicated their assertion quoting a whole series of blood-curdling detective stories and spy novels written by Obukhov, who would not stop his literary work even at the pre-trial detention centre. Nevertheless, the medical evidence in court established Obukhov's full sanity, and on July 27, 2000, the Moscow city court sentenced the former diplomat to 11 years in prison and forfeiture of estate.

Foreign links of Navy officer charged with espionage> unclear.

By Andrei Kirillov

MOSCOW, December 3 (Itar-Tass) -- The Russian Foreign Ministry "has no sufficient information" on the case of Grigory Pasko, an officer of the Russian Pacific fleet suspected of <espionage>. "The case has got no international echo so far," a representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry told Itar-Tass on Wednesday.

Contributor to the Boyevaya Vakhta (Combat Vigil) newspaper Pasko was detained on November 23 at Vladivostok airport on his arrival from a private trip to Japan. He was charged with high treason.

The Russian FM representative said that Pasko was a Russian citizen, and therefore it was Russian law-enforcement bodies that should be concerned with him. "If they reveal something, and furnish valid proof, talks with a particular country may be launched," the diplomat said. As of now, things have not taken the turn, he emphasized.

Law-enforcement bodies in <Russia also do not officially link

Pasko case" with a particular country.

Pasko had been carrying out his own investigation into the ways of utilising liquid radioactive wastes at the Pacific fleet. He had published a number of articles devoted to environmental danger the Maritime territory faced. However, Itar-Tass reported from Vladivostok that the version of Pasko struggling for environmental safety of the region had not been verified during the investigation.

Author: By Adam Kleszewski. The Moscow News

A court in the Russian central province of Bashkortostan has handed down a verdict of "guilty" to a Russian physicist, charged with illegally exporting dual-use technology to South Korea.

The scientist was given a suspended six-year term in prison with a three-year probation period, an Interfax correspondent reported from the courtroom.

Oskar A. Kaibyshev, 66, head and founder of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Metallic Superplasticity Problems, originally faced up to 10 years in prison for illegally exporting technology and research to a subsidiary of South Korea's Hankook Tire Manufacturing Co.

Throughout the proceedings, Kaibyshev has maintained his innocence, claiming the technology developed at a research institute that he headed had already been patented in the United States and other countries.

"This is not secret work," Kaibyshev said in an interview with The Washington Post last year.

"All this technology and the scientific basis for this technology were publicly known. We worked openly. All our contracts were official."

The court also barred Kaibyshev from holding any high posts in research institutes for a period of three years and ordered him to pay a fine of 3,518,000 rubles to the research institute where he had worked, news website Gazeta.Ru reported

Kaibyshev's lawyers say they will appeal against the verdict.

This is yet another in a string of sentences for Russian scientists accused of <espionage> in recent years but a rare one where the defendant received a suspended sentence.

Currently, another Russian physicist and mathematician from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, Oleg Korobeinikov, is being charged with disclosing state secrets. Korobeinikov, who is the head of a laboratory of combustion kinetics at the Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion in the Siberian department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has given a written pledge not to leave the area and is being questioned by Federal Security Service (FSB) investigators.

In February, a Moscow court ruled to keep a member of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics, Igor Reshetin, under custody after he was charged with sharing dual-purpose technologies with a Chinese corporation.

In 2004, a court in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, sentenced physicist Valentin Danilov to 14 years in prison for spying for China. The investigation found that Danilov passed the results of research conducted for the Russian Defense Ministry to Chinese colleagues in 1999. Danilov was also accused of embezzling over 450,000 rubles belonging to the university where he worked.

That same year another scholar, Igor Sutyagin, an arms control expert at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies was found guilty and was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a court of jury in a closed trial. Sutyagin who was arrested in 1999 and has been imprisoned ever since, was accused of having five meetings with British intelligence agents to whom he passed materials on Russian weapons systems, as well as plans for <Russia>'s strategic nuclear forces, information about the structure and condition of the Russian early warning system, and other sensitive data. He pleaded not guilty claiming that, as a civilian researcher he did not have access to any classified materials and that his research was based entirely on non-classified sources, such as newspaper articles and publicly available government documents. At the time, Sutyagin's lawyer, as well as various human rights groups called the sentence illegal, primarily because "the judge had dismissed the previous jury who had taken part in the proceedings, without any procedural reason and had selected the new jury." There were also several former officers of <Russia>'s security services among the new jurors.

In 2003, oceanographer Vladimir Shchurov, earlier accused by the FSB of smuggling sensitive equipment from Vladivostok to China, was acquitted of <espionage and given a two-year suspended sentence for disclosing state secrets. He was later amnestied.

MN

By Olga Semynova

MOSCOW, October 7 (Itar-Tass) - A spokeswoman for <Russia>'s Foreign Intelligence Service said on Tuesday foreign media allegation, that three Americans who had been detained on <espionage> charges were involved in spying for <Russia>, were entirely "groundless."

"These are absolutely groundless conjectures," Tatyana Samolis told Itar-Tass.

The three, namely Kurt Alan Stand, 42, his wife Theresa Squillacote, 39, and James Clark, 49, were arrested last week on charges of spying for East Germany in 1970s and 1980s and those of conspiracy to commit <espionage for the former USSR and the Russian Federation, and South Africa.

The affidavit says Stand was recruited by East Germany's intelligence service already back in 1972, then, four years later, he involved in his spying activity Clark and his wife between 1979 and 1981. The three have been known for their pro- Marxist ideas.

After the unification of East and West Germanies, the FBI said in its act of indictment, the three began looking for new patrons trying to establish contacts with the Soviet and later with the Russian secret services.

In addition, though a South African collaborator, they tried to sell off classified information to the South African government.

The three were arrested after two of them handed over classified documents to a FBI agent posing as a South African intelligence officer.

Author: Oksana Yablokova. Staff Writer

A Moscow district military court convicted a former border guard officer of spying for Estonia and sentenced him to 10 years in prison.

The sentence on charges of state treason is considerably milder than the 14 years handed to Krasnoyarsk physicist Valentin Danilov last month on similar charges and the 17 years handed to scientist Igor Sutyagin in April.

Lieutenant Colonel Igor Vyalkov, 34, was found guilty of selling secret information to an Estonian intelligence agent in a closed trial at Moscow's Lefortovo prison, Interfax reported.

The court, which stripped Vyalkov of his military rank, found that he contacted an Estonian intelligence agent, identified by prosecutors as Zoya Kint, and passed information to her on three Russian intelligence officers.

The court, however, threw out charges that Vyalkov illegally collected and stored secret information, saying prosecutors had not provided evidence that the disclosure of the information could have inflicted damage on Russia>.

The court also dismissed a charge that Vyalkov illegally crossed the Russian-Estonian border, saying a five-year statute of limitation had expired.

Vyalkov was arrested in 2002.

Vyalkov maintained his innocence and testified that he was trying to recruit Kint, Interfax reported.

Prosecutors had asked that Vyalkov be sentenced to 15 years in prison.

It was unclear whether Vyalkov might appeal.

The case is the latest in a series of <espionage> trials. Human rights activists have condemned many of the trials as part of a new wave of spy mania. Danilov was convicted of passing classified information to Chinese companies in a retrial, which the Supreme Court ordered after he was acquitted by a jury. Fellow scientists accuse the Federal Security Service of using him and Sutyagin in an attempt to scare researchers.

But Andrei Soldatov, editor of Agentura.ru, which focuses on Russian secret services, said Vyalkov and other security and military servicemen are less likely to get a fair trial on spying charges than civilians like Danilov.

"Any civilian tried on <espionage> charges has a chance. At least he can make his position public and say something to justify himself," Soldatov wrote in a comment in this week's Moskovskiye Novosti.

He said human rights advocates, lawyers and journalists can help publicize a civilian's case.

"A security service officer accused of <espionage is in quite a different situation," Soldatov said. "His fate is decided quietly and discreetly, and the public will only know what [FSB] officials on Lubyanka decide is necessary to make public."