Russia jails photographer for 16 years for handing material to American journalist
The harsh sentence comes as Russia has radically expanded its definition of state secrets since the 2022 Ukraine invasion
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.
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.
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.