Grigory Skvortsov, arrested in 2023, was found guilty of treason for passing information about once-secret Soviet-era bunkers to journalist
A Russian court said on Thursday it had found a photographer, Grigory Skvortsov, guilty of treason and jailed him for 16 years after Skvortsov said he had passed detailed information about once-secret Soviet-era bunkers to an American journalist.
Skvortsov, who was arrested in 2023, denied wrongdoing. In a December 2024 interview with Pervy Otdel, a group of exiled Russian lawyers, he said he had passed on information that was either publicly available online or available to buy from the Russian author of a book about Soviet underground facilities for use in the event of a nuclear war.
A court in Perm said in a statement that Skvortsov would serve his sentence in a maximum-security corrective prison camp and that his treason had been fully proven in a trial it said had been held behind closed doors.
It published a photograph of him in a glass courtroom cage dressed in black looking calm as he listened to the verdict being read out.
