Photo: FSB. Moscow, Lubyanka Square
The Moscow City Court sentenced Alexander Shiplyuk, director of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM) of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to 15 years in a maximum security penal colony. The FSB accused him of treason. Shiplyuk did not admit his guilt.
In addition, the court sentenced him to a fine of 500 thousand rubles and one and a half years of restricted freedom after his release, Radio Liberty reports.
The court heard the case behind closed doors – without listeners and journalists, and therefore it is unknown how the prosecutor's office proved the scientist's guilt.
The arrest of the 57-year-old corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences became known in August 2022; he was immediately sent from Novosibirsk to the Moscow pretrial detention center “Lefortovo”. Reuters sources claimed that the FSB suspected the scientist of handing over documents during a scientific conference in China in 2017. He himself insists that the information in question is in the public domain.
Over the past two years, the FSB has detained and the court has arrested three Novosibirsk scientists who worked at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics: in addition to Shiplyuk, his teacher, the institute's chief researcher Anatoly Maslov, and the founder of the High-Speed Aerogasdynamics laboratory, Valery Zvegintsev, have been charged with treason. He was one of Shiplyuk's co-authors in several publications. At the end of May, a court in St. Petersburg sentenced 77-year-old Maslov to 14 years in a maximum-security penal colony on charges of treason.
Since 2018, at least 12 scientists have been arrested in Russia who were studying physical processes at hypersonic speeds. As the BBC Russian Service writes in its investigation, orders for their arrests came to the FSB directly from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Three of those arrested have since died.
Human rights activists believe that all criminal cases related to the topic of “hypersound” are falsified. They see the reason for their initiation in the personal interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who since 2005 has used “advanced hypersonic Russian technologies, which have no analogues in the world”, as a threat to the so-called collective West.
Prepared by: Sergey Daga