(Reuters) -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 a U.S. journalist.
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 purchase 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 U.S. 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.
Russia radically expanded its definition of what constitutes a state secret after it sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022 and has since jailed academics, scientists and journalists it deems to have illegally shared secrets.
An online support group for Skvortsov said on Telegram after the verdict that “a miracle had not happened” and the photographer’s only hope of getting out of jail was to be exchanged as part of a prisoner swap between Russia and the West.
(Reporting by Reuters; writing by Andrew Osborn in London; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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