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

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The man is accused of high treason and espionage> for a western country.

Valery Komissarov, the press secretary of the court, said the data had been named during preliminary hearings, held behind closed doors.

The defendant refrained from demanding trial by a jury panel and will be tried by a single judge, Yevgeny Zubov, who earlier heard the criminal case of the Russian Army officers, charged with killing a reporter of a Moscow-based popular daily ten years ago.

Investigators say Vyalkov's crime goes back to 2002, when he leaked confidential data to a western secret service for a fee. He was an officer at a branch of the Federal Security Service (FSB) at the time.

While handing over the data, Vyalkov illegally crossed <Russia's border several times.

He was detained at the end of 2002 while handing data to the secret service's agents and placed to the Lefortovo custody center of the FSB.

Author: Viktoria Sokolova

MOSCOW, February 9 (Itar-Tass) - Russian authorities have no claims against non-governmental organizations involved in the latest <espionage row, the chairwoman of the presidential council for promoting civil society and human rights institutions said on Thursday.

Ella Pamfilova pointed out that the Constitutional Council that is now being created within the framework of the Citizens' G8 project includes NGOs that indirectly suffered from this row.

"It was announced at the Foreign Ministry's meeting that the Russian authorities have no claims to make," Pamfilova said.

Last month the FSB security service accused four British diplomats of spying and said that one of them had brought funds for non-governmental organizations, including the country's most prominent human rights group, the Moscow Helsinki Group.

Author: Vadim Neshkumai

BISHKEK, July 2 (Itar-Tass) - Ten high-ranking officials have been detained on suspicion of <espionage, sources at the press service of Kyrgyzstan's National Security Service told Tass on Friday.

The press service officials said the detainees, whose names are not made public in the interests of investigation, were employees of the country's government office and the presidential administration.

According to unconfirmed data, the detainees worked in favour of radical and extremist groupings.

Author: Yury Senatorov

(By Yury Senatorov. Kommersant, Aug. 10, 2006, pp. 1, 4. Condensed text:) The Moscow District Military Court passed sentence yesterday on retired GRU [Chief Intelligence Administration] Col. Sergei Skripal...

The Moscow military court heard the case of Sergei Skripal, 55, behind closed doors. Reporters were allowed in only to hear the verdict.

The judge read out his decision at a fast clip: "Sergei Skripal is found guilty of treason in the form of divulging state secrets to representatives of foreign intelligence services and engaging in espionage>. In accordance with Art. 48 of the Criminal Code, Skripal is stripped of his military rank of colonel and of all state awards." The judge then sentenced the former GRU colonel to 13 years in a strict-regime penal colony.

Skripal... remained calm as the verdict was read. His defense attorneys intend to appeal the verdict to the Supreme Court's military collegium in the near future.

Considering the gravity of the crime, Russian Chief Military Prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky, who argued the state's case at the trial (the state was initially represented by his predecessor, the recently dismissed Aleksandr Savenkov), had demanded that Sergei Skripal be given 15 years. But the court, in view of the defendant's having cooperated with investigators and his numerous physical ailments, gave him two years less than that. It should be noted that Art. 275 of the Criminal Code ("Treason"), under which the former military officer was convicted, provides for incarceration for up to 20 years.

Sergei Skripal was detained in December 2004 near his home on Osenny Boulevard shortly after returning from Great Britain. Officers of the Federal Security Service [FSB] had by then ascertained that he was the person responsible for disclosures of classified information. But in order to be 100% certain, Mr. Skripal, who had gone into business after being discharged into the reserves in 1999, was put under surveillance. The surveillance confirmed that Mr. Skripal was repeatedly meeting with British diplomats accredited in Moscow, and also with members of the Secret Intelligence Service in Great Britain itself.

According to the FSB's public relations center, Mr. Skripal came clean shortly after his arrest, testifying that he had been recruited by British intelligence agencies back in 1995, when he was a military intelligence officer, and had provided them with information about GRU agents operating in European countries. The agents were subsequently expelled from those countries. The FSB says that Mr. Skripal may have done as much damage to Russian intelligence as GRU officer Oleg Penkovsky did to Soviet intelligence. Penkovsky also worked for British intelligence, revealing the identities of Soviet agents in Great Britain and the US.

According to Russian intelligence, Mr. Skripal continued to work for British intelligence even after he was discharged from the Armed Forces, gathering information through colleagues working on the General Staff. "Through his actions, the spy caused considerable damage to <Russia's defense capability and state security," the FSB stressed.

During the investigation, which lasted from December 2004 to late June 2006, accused spy Skripal testified that "every time I met with members of British intelligence, they paid me a fee in hard currency for the information I provided." In addition, the former officer had a Spanish bank account into which money was deposited every month. The Moscow military court and the FSB told Kommersant that Mr. Skripal had received a total of just over $100,000 during the nine years he worked for foreign intelligence...

A Kommersant source in the intelligence community said that investigators had managed to persuade Mr. Skripal to cooperate with them and had obtained "extensive information" about the former colonel's contacts and connections. At the same time, the FSB stressed that Sergei Skripal had had nothing to do with the recent scandal involving the "spy rock" (a data-storage device) from which employees of the British Embassy in Moscow uploaded information placed in the "rock" by an unidentified agent [see Current Digest, Vol. 58, No. 4, pp. 1-4]. Skripal was already in custody when that agent was unmasked...

In London last week, an interagency delegation led by Deputy Prosecutor General Aleksandr Zvyagintsev discussed matters relating to the extradition of former Yukos employees, as well as political émigré Boris Berezovsky and Ichkerian [Chechen separatist] envoy Akhmed Zakayev. But despite the fact that the delegates were received at the highest level - for example, British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith met with them - they have returned to Moscow virtually empty-handed. The British authorities told the delegation once again that extradition issues are the prerogative of the courts, and that they will not interfere with that prerogative. In the end, the trip, which had been announced with great fanfare by the Prosecutor General's Office, was modestly described as a "working visit," and the PGO revealed nothing about its outcome. So it can be assumed that the latest spy scandal will only exacerbate relations between Moscow and London...

MOSCOW, December 19 (Itar-Tass) - Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Nikolai Patrushev noted that "foreign secret services showed higher activity against Russia>, first of all, the secret services in the Baltic states" in 2007.

"Foreign intelligence services are keenly interested in the information about the political and socio-economic situation in <Russia>, the measures the Russian leadership is taking to strengthen the statehood, territorial integrity and economy, the protection of national interests on the international scene, particularly <Russia>'s reaction to the development of events in the CIS states," Nikolai Patrushev said. "They showed great interest in the election campaigns for the elections in the State Duma and the upcoming presidential elections," the FSB director said.

"Some positive results were achieved in the struggle with foreign intelligence services," Patrushev said. "In 2007 22 foreign security officers and 71 spies were unmasked. Eleven foreign security officers and spies, who were caught red handed during their unlawful activity, four foreigners involved in the activity of foreign secret services were extradited from <Russia>," Patrushev said.

"Three Russian citizens were convicted for high treason. Shabaturov, who leaked the information about the Russian military intelligence service to a foreign secret service, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Arsentyev, who passed the military sensitive information to a foreign intelligence service, was sentenced to nine years in prison. Yurenya, who also passed the military sensitive information to a foreign intelligence service, was sentenced to seven years in prison," Patrushev said.

Patrushev noted that the Kaliningrad regional court is hearing the case against an officer of the Federal Penitentiary Service department in the Kaliningrad region, Lieutenant-Colonel Khitryuk, who is accused of high treason through <espionage> for a Baltic secret service.

The criminal case was instituted under the same article against two Russian citizens, who collected and passed the classified information to the military intelligence service in a country in the Asia-Pacific region. The criminal case was instituted under the article for <espionage> after the British Secret Intelligence Service recruited Russian citizen Zharko to collect different information for its further use to the detriment of <Russia>'s foreign security.

To combat the illegal migration Russian prosecutor's offices, the law enforcement agencies and the secret services of Uzbekistan, Finland, Israel, Italy, Moldova and Ukraine "busted an international criminal group, which was involved in the trade in people and the illegal trafficking of CIS citizens via <Russia in Western Europe under forged Russian foreign travel passports," the FSB director went on to say. Seventeen members of this criminal group - six Russian citizens and 11 foreigners - were arrested during the search operation, Patrushev said.

About 7,000 controlling measures were carried out to protect the state secrets, Patrushev said. Thirty criminal cases were instituted for the secrecy violations at the facilities checked by the security service under Article 283 for the disclosure of the state secret and Article 284 for the loss of documents containing the state secret, and more than 600 cases were opened for administrative offences. Over 450 licenses issued earlier for the right to work with the information containing the state secret were suspended or revoked, Patrushev said.

He also emphasized that ten people were convicted for the disclosure of the state secret. Last October the Moscow Regional Military Court found guilty former serviceman of the military topographic department of the Russian General Staff Veselov in the disclosure of the information constituting the state secret and office abuse and was convicted.

MOSCOW, June 15 (Itar-Tass) - The investigation department of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), with the General Prosecutor Office's consent, has instituted legal proceedings over espionage>, as a result of checking of Russian businessman Andrei Lugovoi's statement, the FSB public relations service told Itar-Tass on Friday. No names linked with the case were given.

On May 22, the British prosecutor's office accused Lugovoi of murdering Alexander Litvinenko and demanded to extradite the Russian citizen. The businessman said he was not guilty. Later, he told a press conference in Moscow that the main role in the dark story was played by British secret services and their agents - Berezovsky and Litvinenko.

Lugovoi said that British secret services attempted to recruit him to collect compromising information against the Russian president. They were also interested in information about the Federal Security Service's activities in the so-called "English direction". Lugovoi said the British intelligence service first recruited Litvinenko and then entrepreneur Boris Berezovsky who is charged in <Russia with a number of crimes.

Lugovoi asked to regard his statement as officially addressed to the Russian General Prosecutor's Office.

Former Federal Security Service officer Litvinenko died of polonium poisoning in London in November last year.

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"Having agreed with the arguments presented by the state prosecution, the court found Sypachev guilty of the charges filed against him", the. Main Military Prosecutor's Office told Itar-Tass.

The court also stripped Sypachev of his rank of colonel.

The trial took place at the Lefortovo pre-trial detention prison. The press was not allowed to attend. The Main Military Prosecutor's Office has declined comment.

Detained American in Moscow prison has no complaints: FSB.

By Boris Kipkeyev

MOSCOW, April 6 (Itar-Tass) - A U.S. consular officer has visited the American citizen detained by Russian Federal Security Service agents on spying charges earlier this week. The FSB said Americans had issued no complaints about the prison conditions or treatment of the detainee.

"The American side has no complaints either about the conditions of his keeping or the reasons for the arrest, the FSB public relations department said on Thursday. It declined to name the arrested person.

The U.S. citizen was arrested in Moscow earlier this week in a joint operation conducted by the FSB's Economic Security department and its branches in the Moscow and Novosibirsk regions.

A director of a private firm, he used to work for U.S. Intelligence. Simultaneously with the arrest of the American citizen, the FSB detained a Russian specialist in defense technologies at a Moscow organization, on suspicion of divulging state secrets.

The FSB public relations department told Itar-Tass that investigation materials show that "the foreigner has been purposefully establishing contacts with Russian scientists in Moscow, Novosibirsk and other towns for a long time," in order to collect top secret information.

During a search, FSB agents found and seized from the US citizen many documents which proved his espionage> activities in <Russia>.

"Those were technical drawings of various equipment, recordings of talks with Russian citizens about their work in the domestic defense industry, as well as receipts for money given by the American," the FSB said.

FSB officers found a large sum in foreign currency on the arrested Russian citizen.

According to the FSB, foreign secret services have not decreased their activity in <Russia. Last year, FSB agents arrested 65 professional foreign intelligence agents and 30 Russian citizens who cooperated with them.

A Moscow court on Monday convicted the head of a leading rocket and space research center and sentenced him to 11 1/2 years in prison for illegally selling weapons technology to China.

The Lefortovsky District Court convicted Igor Reshetin, head of TsNIIMash-Export of the Central Research Institute for Machine Building, and three of his colleagues in the case, court spokeswoman Irina Shagalina said.

Sergei Vizir, Mikhail Ivanov and Alexander Rozhkin were given prison sentences ranging from five to 11 years, Shagalina said. She declined to give further details.

The trial is one of several opened against researchers with foreign contacts in recent years.

TsNIIMash-Export was founded in 1991 to handle foreign space contracts. It has signed and fulfilled numerous agreements with China, the United States and European countries.

Reshetin was arrested in October 2005 after an almost two-year investigation into a contract with the same Chinese company implicated in the case of Valentin Danilov, a physicist who was convicted of selling classified information on space technology to China. Danilov was sentenced to 14 years in prison for providing information that he said had been published in part in scientific magazines.

He has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and his lawyer, Anatoly Yablokov, said he would appeal Monday's verdict, which he called "biased, illegal and unfair," Interfax reported.

Several scientists have been convicted of espionage and illegally exporting technology, including Danilov, weapons researcher Igor Sutyagin and Ufa-based physicist Oskar Kaibyshev.

The Moscow Times

Foreign states interested in new types of Russian armour.

By Anatoly Yurkin

MOSCOW, August 13 (Itar-Tass) - Secret services of foreign states were interested in information on new types of Russian armour, including the T-90S tank. This was found out after Alexander Sakov, recruited by the Israeli foreign intelligence service to conduct espionage> activities, was caught red-handed in Omsk.

Itar-Tass learnt at the public relations centre of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) that Sakov was a paid agent of the Nativ secret service which operated in <Russia under the cover of the immigration section of the Israeli embassy in Moscow, and collected information on questions of interest for this service.

Officers of the FSB administration for the Omsk Region laid bare the informer of the Israeli foreign intelligence at the Transmash munitions factory, manufacturing T-80U and its modifications.

Sakov had "a direct access to secrets of the Black Eagle tank, the combat vehicle of the 21st century under development". Foreign intelligence services display increased interest in its fighting qualities.

The tank was developed by Siberian tank builders under the guidance of Boris Kurakin, general designer of the Omsk transport engineering factory.

Experts believe that the Black Eagle will eclipse by 70 percent such Western-made tanks as M1A2 Abrams, Leclerc and Leopard-2 as to its manoeuvrability, fire power, armour impenetrability and protection.

Defence Ministry officials explained to Itar-Tass on Thursday that foreign specialists display no less interest in another new Russian (missile-gun) tank, the T-90S, manufactured in the Urals.

This combat vehicle of the new generation embodied in its design advanced scientific and technical solutions which make it one of the best in the world both in offensive and defensive battles.

Similar to the Black Eagle, the T-90S will be a combat vehicle of the 21st century and will be the leader on the world arms market over the next decades as to its main qualities.

MOSCOW (RIA Novosti ) - The head of Russia>'s Federal Security Service told a popular weekly that the FSB had identified over 300 foreign spies over the past four years.

"More than 270 actively operating agents and 70 foreign intelligence recruits, including 35 Russians, have been exposed since 2003," Argumenty i Fakty quoted Nikolai Patrushev as saying. He said that 14 agents and 33 recruits have been caught this year alone.

Patrushev said six Russians were caught in an attempt to transfer state secrets to foreign countries, and have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

Retired Colonel Valentin Shabaturov was given a 12-year sentence this year for treason and <espionage>. The court proved he had actively cooperated with foreign intelligence for seven years, from 1999 to 2006, and revealed state secrets to them.

Igor Arsentyev, a lieutenant colonel in the reserves, was sentenced to nine years in prison on the same charges in September.

Patrushev said another person is facing court proceedings, and that an investigation is underway into three other cases.

He said the United States and Britain actively used the secret services of Poland, Georgia and Baltic states against <Russia>.

"This concerns a wide spectrum - from staff composition and budget allocations to strategic guidance and organization of joint operations," Patrushev said.

He also said some Georgian secret agents use their connections with the criminal underworld for their operations, and to stage various acts of provocation.