Russian man sentenced to 23 years for treason. FSB says he spied for Polish intelligence.
Russia’s Federal Security Service claimed Georgy Pirogov, a Moscow region resident sentenced in July to 23 years in prison for treason, collected information for Polish intelligence services.
The independent Russian news outlet Mediazona reported Pirogov’s sentencing in mid-July, citing a source familiar with the ruling. According to the outlet, Pirogov moved to Georgia after the full-scale war began in 2022 and worked there as an industrial climber. In July 2024, he traveled to Kungrad, Uzbekistan, for work and then went silent.
According to the FSB, Pirogov then traveled to Poland, where he met with a representative of Polish intelligence who tasked him with collecting and passing on “secret information about advanced weapons models” Russia is using in the war with Ukraine.
Pirogov had contacts among employees of Russia’s defense industry, the FSB claimed, and used them to obtain classified information about the production and use of missile systems, along with personal data on people with access to state secrets, in order to draw them into “activity against the security of the Russian Federation.”
The security service also added that Pirogov transferred cryptocurrency to fund the Ukrainian armed forces and bought equipment that he arranged to have delivered from Poland to Ukraine.
It remains unclear where and how Pirogov was detained. Mediazona also noted that it is unclear how he ended up back in Russia.
A case file on the Moscow courts’ website shows the Moscow City Court heard Pirogov’s appeal on July 9, with the Meshchansky District Court serving as the court of first instance. The case appears to have been under review for at least two years: another case file shows Pirogov’s pretrial detention was extended in September 2024.
Russia toughened the penalty for treason to life imprisonment in 2023. Before that, the maximum sentence was 20 years, less than what Pirogov received. Even earlier, courts occasionally handed down sentences above the maximum in rare cases: journalist Ivan Safronov, for instance, was sentenced to 22 years after being charged with treason in a fabricated case.
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