A Russian court sentenced a Russian expert who passed secret information to the Chinese Communist Party to eight years in prison for “treason,” Reuters reported on Feb. 25.
Vladimir Vasiliev, 52, was reportedly arrested in August 2019 in the Zabaykalsky region, located in Russia’s eastern Siberia bordering China and Mongolia. Vasiliev subsequently pleaded guilty to the charges, but the trial was held behind closed doors due to the sensitive information involved in the case. Local Russian media, which was the first to disclose the news, could not be given more details.
While Russia has been promoting close diplomatic ties with China since 2014 in the face of concerted Western sanctions over Crimea, a number of Russian figures have so far been punished on treason charges for their involvement in leaking information to the Chinese Communist Party.
Russian state prosecutors last year charged Valery Mityko, president of the St. Petersburg Arctic Academy of Sciences, with leaking state secrets to China; another Russian science and technology expert was also arrested in Siberia last October on charges of allegedly passing technical information to the Chinese.
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