Russian President Vladimir Putin often boasts that his country is a world leader in developing hypersonic weapons, which travel more than five times faster than the speed of sound.
In recent years, a large number of Russian physicists have been accused of treason and are now in prison. Given this, human rights groups denounce a wave of excessive repression.
Most of the detainees are elderly and three of them have already died. One who was hospitalized, fighting for his life in the last phase of terminal cancer, was taken out of bed and died shortly after.
Another is Vladislav Galkina 68-year-old academic whose home in Tomsk, southern Russia, was raided in April 2023.
A group of armed men with black masks arrived at 4:00 in the morning, searched the closets of his house and They took papers with scientific formulasaccording to the story of a close friend.
Galkin’s wife, Tatyana, says he told his grandchildren, who liked to play chess with him, that he was on a business trip.
Tatyana claims that the Russian security agency, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), has prohibited her from speaking about the case.
Scrutiny on hypersonic technology
Since 2015, Russia has arrested 12 physicists, all of them linked in some way to hypersonic technology or with institutions that work in it.
All are charged with high treason, a crime that can include passing state secrets to foreign countries.
Treason trials in Russia are held behind closed doors, so it is not known exactly what they are accused of.
The Kremlin has only said that “The accusations are serious.” and has declined to comment further, due to Russian special services being involved in the cases.
But colleagues of the defendants and defense lawyers say the scientists were not involved in weapons development and that some of the cases are based on them openly collaborating with other foreign researchers.
Critics suggest that the FSB wants to create the impression that foreign spies are trying to obtain secrets about Russian weapons.
Hypersonic technology means that missiles can travel at extremely fast speeds and can also change direction during flight, evading any air defenses that may exist.
Russia says it has used two types of hypersonic missiles in its war against Ukraine: the aircraft-launched Kinzhal and the Zircon cruise missile.
However, Kyiv says its forces have managed to shoot down some Kinzhal missileswhich raises doubts about its real capabilities.
As technology was developed and deployed, arrests continued. Shortly after Galkin’s arrest in April 2023, he was remanded in custody on the same day as another scientist, Valery Zvegintsev, with whom he had co-written several scientific papers.
Russian state news agency Tass cited a source who explained that Zvegintsev’s arrest may have been motivated by an article that was published in an Iranian magazine in 2021.
The names of Galkin and Zvegintsev appear on a article on air intake mechanisms for high-speed aircraft, published by said magazine.
During the summer of 2022, the FSB arrested two colleagues of Zvegintsev who worked at the same institute, the director and the former head of an aerodynamics laboratory. Employees of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM) wrote an open letter in support of the three arrested colleagues.
Now removed from the institute’s website, the letter claimed that the arrested people were known for their “brilliant scientific results” and that “they had always remained faithful” to the interests of their country.
In addition, it explained that the publicly shared work had been reviewed repeatedly by the ITAM commission of experts, who searched for information that could be considered classified, but found nothing compromising.
“Hypersonic technology is an issue for which people can now be imprisoned,” explains Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with the First Division, a Russian legal and human rights organization.
Smirnov used to defend scientists and others accused of treason in court before moving from Russia to Prague, Czech Republic, in 2021, fearing repercussions for his work.
He states that None of the dozen scientists who were arrested had anything to do with the defense sectorbut rather they studied scientific issues such as the deformation of metals at hypersonic speeds or the effects of turbulence.
The arrests began a few years ago with Vladimir Lapygin, who is now 83 years old. He was jailed in 2016 but released on parole four years later.
He had worked for 46 years for the Russian space agency’s main research institute, TsNIIMash.
Lapygin was convicted for a software package for aerodynamic calculations that he sent to a Chinese contact.
He alleges that he sent a demo version as part of a series of conversations about the possibility of selling the full package on behalf of the institute.
Maintains that the version he shared did not contain any secret informationwas just one example that had been “repeatedly described in open publications.”
Lapygin told the BBC that all the arrests apparently linked to hypersonic missiles “had nothing to do” with weapons development.
Another detained scientist was Dimitri Kolker, a specialist at the Institute of Laser Physics, also in Siberia, who was arrested in 2022 while he was in a hospital where he was being treated for advanced pancreatic cancer.
His family indicated that the charges against him were based on lectures he gave in China, but the content of which had been approved by the FSB. They say that even an agent traveled with him.
Kolker died two days after his arrest, aged 54.
“There is a conflict within the system,” says a colleague of one of the detained scientists, who prefers to remain anonymous.
Scientists are still expected to publish internationally and collaborate with foreign colleagues “and at the same time, the FSB considers contact with foreign scientists and writing for foreign journals to be a betrayal of the country,” he says.
ITAM scientists think the same. “We simply do not know how to continue doing our jobs,” his open letter said.
“What they reward us today… tomorrow will be cause for criminal prosecution.”
They warn that scientists are afraid to dedicate themselves to some areas of research, while young talents abandon science.
The letter was a rare example of public support. The other institutes where the detained scientists worked did not comment.
Other cases are also understood to be linked to international collaborations.
According to lawyer Smirnov, who worked on the case, an investigation into two other scientists was linked to Hexafly, a European project to develop a hypersonic civil aircraft.
That project, now completed, was led by the European Space Agency and began in 2012.
The agency told the BBC that “all contributions and technical exchanges were agreed and provided for” in a cooperation agreement between the Russian and European parties involved.
Both scientists were sentenced to 12 years in prison last year, although Russia’s Supreme Court ordered a new trial for one of them.
Other arrests were related to a study on the aerodynamics when a space vehicle re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere.
It was funded by a European Union scheme and run by the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium.
FSB researchers were concerned about a rounded cone shape that looked like a warhead in research that one of the scientists, Viktor Kudryavtsev, sent to the von Karman Institute, according to his widow, Olga.
The institute notes that the program, which ran between 2011 and 2013, “excluded military research.”
He adds that “they could not find any trace of disclosure of secret information” by Kudryavtsev’s team.
A pattern of arrests
Human rights groups see a pattern.
Smirnov indicates that, in private conversations, FSB officials admitted to him that cases were being opened regarding the exchange of secrets of hypersonic technology “to satisfy the wishes of those above“.
He believes the FSB wants to give the impression that spies are looking for secrets about Russian missiles “to flatter Putin’s ego.”
The cases come amid a rise in treason accusations.
Sergei Davidis, who heads support work for Russian political prisoners at the Memorial human rights centre, speaks of an “atmosphere of spy mania”, especially since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Speaking from Lithuania, where his organization moved after it was banned in Russia, Davidis says he believes the FSB, eager to show it is complying, “increases your reporting statistics by manufacturing cases”.
But he believes there may be other factors in the arrests of scientists, such as competition for state contracts or even a message of discontent from the Kremlin directed at all scientists involved in hypersonic technology.
Smirnov explains that the FSB sometimes offers more lenient sentences if suspects confess and implicate others.
Kudryavtsev was offered a deal in which he would admit his guilt and point the finger at someone else, his widow, Olga, said.
He said no. He died of lung cancer in 2021, at age 77, before his case went to trial.
Retired FSB General Alexander Mikhailov says the agency “must guarantee the confidentiality” of military technology.
“Without a doubt,” he affirms that there must be “founded reasons” to impose severe sentences, such as the 14-year prison sentence imposed in May on one of the three ITAM scientists, Anatoly Maslov.
General Mikhailov points out that the current increase in cases of treason is a product of the expansion of freedoms and democracy in the 1990s.
He indicates that this led to a change in attitude compared to the Soviet era, when he says that those who had access to state secrets were “thoroughly scrutinized.”
“Some people talked too much and leaks appeared,” he adds.
As for Galkin, it’s been more than a year since the masked agents arrived. His relative says he spent the first three months in solitary confinement.
Other scientists arrested in Russia:
- Alexander Shiplyuk, 57 years old, director of ITAM, detained in 2022, awaiting trial
- Alexander Kuranov, former director of the St. Petersburg Scientific Research Enterprise of Hypersonic Systems, arrested in 2021, sentenced to seven years in prison in April 2024
- Roman Kovalyov, colleague of Vladimir Kudryavtsev at TsNIIMash, sentenced in 2020 to seven years in prison, died in 2022
