Russia, under Putin treason charges are back in vogue (and on the up)
Moscow (AsiaNews) - A mother, a scientist, a collaborator
of the Patriarchate of Moscow and a sailor from the Black Sea fleet. There are the
four Russian citizens arrested in recent weeks, accused of high treason. The number
of people accused of this 'crime', report human rights activists, continues to
grow and is not easy to keep track of, because these cases are classified as "state
secret".
Four cases in a few weeks
What has so far made most headlines was the case of Svetlana Davydova, 36 years old and mother of seven children including an infant, arrested in January in Vyazma - Smolensk region, some 250 km north of the border between Russia and Ukraine - for having allegedly called, in April 2014, the Kiev embassy in Moscow, warning of movements of Russian troops to the former Soviet Republic, after seeing the empty barracks of her city.
The woman was placed in preventive detention in the high-security Lefortovo prison in Moscow, where she was released on bail on February 3, after which over 40 thousand people signed a petition to the Kremlin for her release. However, she is still suspected of treason and could face up to 20 years in prison.
Yevgeny Petrin is facing a similar plight. His case came to the fore on 9 February, when the former Secret Service agent (FSB) and collaborator of the Department for External Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, was arrested on charges of treason, suspected of having passed "important strategic information" on the Orthodox Church to the United States.
According to information from prison directors at Lefortovo, where he is in custody, he will remain in prison until April. According to his brother, who spoke to the newspaper Kommersant, Petrin had set up a network of moles within the Patriarchate in the service of the US, with the purpose of causing a schism between the Ukrainian and Russian Church.
At the same time of the Petrin case that of a sailor from the Black Sea Fleet, Gennady Kravtsov, another one was made public followed by yet another one against Vladimir Golubev, a former researcher at the Russian nuclear center, for the content of his scientific paper published in 2013 on explosives in a Czech magazine.
Amendment to the law on treason
Russian law on high treason was amended in October 2012, after the street
protests against the return of Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin, the largest of
the last 15 years. According to experts, the FSB - which came under fire for
failing to predict and contain the popular dissent- wanted a more powerful tool
for action. The legal definition of treason has been expanded to include "providing
financial, technical or other assistance to foreign States or international
organizations, aimed at damaging Russia security".
Before the changes, the law stated that the prosecution had to be based on
"evidence, consisting of documents and expertise," that would show how
the alleged traitor had revealed state secrets. "Now, however, the opinion
of some intelligence agent is enough: if they decide that some actions or
statements threaten Russia, this is enough," says the journalist Andrei Soldatov,
an expert on intelligence.
He believes the FSB needs to prove that it is defending the country in a situation of terrible danger, with the threat of NATO at the gates. "Although cases of treason never go to trial - says the journalist - a precedent was created: there is no need to implement a crackdown, just send a signal to the people and they will start to behave differently."
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10/09/2018 10:43
