A 64-year-old Russian scholar charged with treason says he's being mistreated in jail

Alexey Temirev says he’s being mistreated in pretrial detention, where guards are allegedly keeping him indoors, denying him needed medical treatment, and delaying his access to medications. You remember Alexey Temirev, right? He’s the 74-year-old Russian scientist who allegedly passed secret information to the Belgian von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics. Just kidding — that’s Viktor Kudryavtsev. Alexey Temirev is a top executive at the energy company “Inter RAO,” charged with espionage for allegedly being a foreign citizen and collaborating with businessmen who have ties to either Moldovan or Romanian intelligence. Nope — that’s Karina Tsurkan.

So who is Temirev really? He’s the 64-year-old scholar from Novocherkassk arrested in earlier this summer for transferring supposedly secret data to Vietnam. Temirev denies the charges, saying he was only sharing open-source research with a Vietnamese graduate student.

Are these all the ongoing treason cases in Russia?

Hardly. Without a comprehensive look at everything before judges right now, it’s worth remembering the treason charges against Dmitry Dokuchaev, Sergey Mikhailov, and Ruslan Stoyanov — cyber-threat experts and hackers accused of sharing information with U.S. intelligence. In April 2018, the magazine RBC reported that Dokuchaev had signed a plea bargain partially confessing to the charges of sharing information with a foreign intelligence agency. He reportedly says he thought his actions would help the fight against global cyber-crime. Meduza special correspondent Daniil Turovsky looked at Russian cyber-defense’s use of hackers in a report published earlier this month.