Russia sentences 2 hypersonic researchers to 12.5 years in prison on treason charges, Kommersant reports
Two scientists who study hypersonic technology, Valery Zvegintsev and Vladislav Galkin, were sentenced to 12.5 years in prison on treason charges by a court in Novosibirsk on May 5, the Russian business daily Kommersant reported. The two have been on trial since 2024, with proceedings held in closed hearings.
Zvegintsev and Galkin will remain under house arrest until the sentence takes effect.
Zvegintsev, a researcher at the S.A. Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITPM) of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the founder of a high-speed aerogasdynamics laboratory, was detained in April 2023. Galkin — an associate professor at Tomsk Polytechnic University and Zvegintsev’s regular co-author — was detained later that year.
The exact charges against the two scientists are unknown. According to Kommersant, the case was presumably prompted by an article they co-authored on gas dynamics that was published in a foreign journal.
In September 2024, Alexander Shiplyuk, the director of ITPM and founder of a high-speed aerogasdynamics laboratory, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on treason charges. The Moscow City Court heard the case. The details of the charges were never officially disclosed. According to unofficial reports, Shiplyuk was accused of passing information about hypersonic weapons to foreign parties. He did not admit guilt, maintaining that the information in question was publicly available.
In May 2024, Anatoly Maslov, a former chief researcher at ITPM, was sentenced to 14 years in prison in St. Petersburg. According to media reports, Maslov, who was arrested in 2022, was accused of passing hypersonic-related data to China and of illegally cooperating with representatives from Germany.
Around the same time as Maslov, Novosibirsk scientist Dmitry Kolker was arrested on treason charges. He died three days after his detention — he had been diagnosed with stage-four cancer.
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