Russia jails photographer for 16 years for handing material to American journalist

South China Morning Post

4 days ago

A Russian court said on Thursday it had found a photographer, Grigory Skvortsov, guilty of treason and jailed him for 16 years after Skvortsov said he had passed detailed information about once-secret Soviet-era bunkers to an American journalist.
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Skvortsov, who was arrested in 2023, denied wrongdoing. In a December 2024 interview with Pervy Otdel, a group of exiled Russian lawyers, he said he had passed on information that was either publicly available online or available to buy from the Russian author of a book about Soviet underground facilities for use in the event of a nuclear war.
He did not name the
US journalist in the interview with Pervy Otdel, which the Russian authorities have in turn designated a 'foreign agent' - a label which carries negative Soviet-era connotations and is designed to limit their activities and influence.
A court in Perm said in a statement that Skvortsov would serve his sentence in a maximum-security corrective prison camp and that his treason had been fully proven in a trial it said had been held behind closed doors.
It published a photograph of him in a glass courtroom cage dressed in black looking calm as he listened to the verdict being read out.
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