Viktor Kudryavtsev, a 77-year-old scientist at the Roscosmos Institute, accused of treason, has died.

77-year-old scientist Viktor Kudryavtsev, whom the FSB accused of high treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code), has died. This was reported by the human rights organization Team 29, which represented his interests.

In July 2018, an employee of the Central Scientific Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering (TsNIIMash, the parent institute of Roscosmos) was discovered in a pre-trial detention center by members of the Public Monitoring Committee.

According to his lawyers, he was accused of sending FP7-Space to the Belgian Institute of Fluid Dynamics in March and October 2013, as part of an international scientific project. von Karman two emails with data that can be used to create new weapons. According to Kommersant , hypersonic technologies used in the Avangard and Kinzhal missile systems were mentioned.

“Team 29” noted that before sending the reports, two commissions - the internal institute and the export technical control commission - did not find confidential information in them.

He spent a year and two months in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center: after his health began to deteriorate sharply under arrest, doctors diagnosed him with lung cancer and he was released on his own recognizance.

In June 2020, Kudryavtsev’s student Roman Kovalev, who was his boss at TsNIIMash and who was arrested in a treason case in the summer of 2019, was sentenced to seven years in a maximum security colony - below the minimum for this article.

The plot of Kovalev’s case was not disclosed. According to TASS, he admitted guilt. “This all resembles a deal when the accused is asked to give incriminating evidence against another person, and the only person involved in his case was our client [Kudryavtsev],” said the head of Team 29, Ivan Pavlov. According to human rights activists, Kudryavtsev was also offered by an investigator to testify against his student in the fall of 2018, but he refused, after which he was deprived of visits to the pre-trial detention center.