A new wave

Federal agents are prosecuting eight new treason cases in Russia’s Far East, including two that involve state secrets allegedly shared with China, Moscow’s most vital global partner

Prosecuting treason in Russia is the domain of the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the agency has opened at least eight new treason cases in the country’s Far East since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to new findings by journalists at BBC News Russian. In at least two of these investigations, the defendants are accused of sharing state secrets with the Chinese government, potentially rattling Moscow’s delicate and vital partnership with Beijing.

The defendants in the two China-related treason cases are Ivan Lukin (a Blagoveshchensk company executive) and Sergey Yatsenko (a businessman from Vladivostok). In March, the Telegram news outlets Baza and Astra broke the news of their separate arrests, but no further details were known until now.

According to the BBC, Lukin had been in business importing Chinese forklifts and their spare parts. On February 17, 2023, he was jailed for 10 days for alleged “disorderly conduct.” Lukin’s detention fit Russia’s pattern of wartime policing wherein officials arrest someone on misdemeanor charges while building a felony case with the suspect already in custody.

Earlier this spring, Baza reported that prosecutors accused Lukin of having been recruited by the Chinese secret services in 2013. Lukin traveled frequently to the Chinese city of Heihe, connected to Blagoveshchensk by a bridge across the Amur River. Investigators at the FSB claim Lukin was recruited during one of his trips to Heihe.

The second treason suspect, Sergey Yatsenko, allegedly traveled to China with Lukin in January 2020 and later began collecting secret information for Beijing about Russia’s nuclear weapons.

The BBC was unable to confirm that Lukin and Yatsenko actually knew one another. The date of their alleged joint trip to China precedes the completion of the Blagoveshchensk–Heihe bridge, and it also doesn’t fit the facts of pandemic travel restrictions in place at the time. Both Lukin and Yatsenko are now in pretrial detention, but there’s no official information about the charges they’re facing.

Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, who was recently sentenced to 22 years in prison in a separate treason case, has pointed out that it’s a common tactic for the FSB to seek connections that might turn up multiple suspects in the course of a single investigation, which boosts the investigators’ recorded productivity.

The remaining six treason cases launched in Russia’s Far East since February 2022 are all connected with the invasion of Ukraine. Three of the suspects allegedly collaborated with Ukrainian secret services; two are accused of financing the Ukrainian military; and a sixth individual allegedly planned to join the Ukrainian armed forces.

Before the invasion, China was among the three countries most often mentioned in Russia’s treason proceedings. According to the newspaper Kommersant, between 1997 and 2019, Russian courts convicted 14 people of transferring state secrets to China. During that same period, the courts issued 26 guilty verdicts in treason cases involving alleged collaboration with the United States and 29 with the Republic of Georgia.

Reporting by Ksenia Churmanova and Sergey Goryashko from BBC News Russian