A prominent Russian scientist specialising in hypersonic technology has been sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of treason. His conviction is the latest in a series of arrests targeting researchers since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, in what experts are calling a politically motivated crackdown on scientists.
Russian scientists Alexander Shipliouk, Anatoly Maslov, and Valery Zvegintsev have more in common than just their roles as leading physicists in hypersonic missile development, one of their country’s technological strengths.
In recent months, all three men have been accused of high treason and detained by Russian authorities.
On September 3, a Moscow court sentenced Shipliouk, the former director of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM) in Siberia, to 15 years in a high-security prison. The closed-door trial found him guilty of sharing “classified information” at a scientific conference in China in 2017. Shipliouk claims that the data he presented was already in the public domain.
His colleague at ITAM, 78-year-old Maslov, who specialises in hypersonic flight, used the same argument after being sentenced to 14 years in prison in May. He too was charged with treason for passing on sensitive information during trips overseas.
Meanwhile, Zvegintsev, another hypersonic expert from the same institute, was arrested last spring and remains in pre-trial detention. Russian authorities only confirmed his arrest after a group of Russian scientists publicly expressed concern for their colleagues in an open letter published last May.
An escalating crackdown on scientists
Researchers at the Novosibirsk-based ITAM are not the only ones who have been targeted by Russian authorities. Alexander Kuranov, an engineer who led a key hypersonic aircraft program in the late Soviet era, was sentenced to seven years in prison for treason in April 2024 after spending more than two years in custody.
Since 2018, at least 11 specialists in hypersonic technology have been detained by Russian authorities, according to the BBC.
The crackdown began the year President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia possessed a hypersonic weapon, purportedly demonstrating the country's military superiority over the United States.
Hypersonic missiles are capable of traveling at extremely high speeds and can alter their course mid-flight to evade air defences.
The repression of Russian scientists escalated even further following the onset of the Ukraine war in February 2022.
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“This is a very vindictive way of targeting scientists. Most of them are older, with at least one terminally ill,” remarked Jenny Mathers, a specialist in Russian intelligence services at Aberystwyth University in Wales.
Russian authorities have shown little mercy to scientists in poor health. Maslov had a heart attack while in custody but the Russian authorities did not hesitate to prosecute him.
In April 2022, authorities even dragged Dmitri Kolker, a physicist battling stage four pancreatic cancer, out of his hospital bed; he died two days after his arrest.
Moscow’s pursuit of knowledge control
The relentless pursuit of scientists involved in the development of hypersonic missiles reflects “the behaviour of an increasingly paranoid and isolated regime”, observed Stephen Hall, a Russia specialist at the University of Bath. Experts believe that the Kremlin is determined to prevent any leakage of sensitive information.
“It looks like Putin is trying to ensure control over every key bit of knowledge,” Mathers said.
This crackdown is not without precedent in Russian history. In 1953, Joseph Stalin's regime launched the “doctors' plot”, a state-sponsored campaign that accused Jewish doctors of conspiring to kill Soviet leaders and of working with the United States. The recent wave of arrests suggests a similar climate of paranoia.
"Researchers, who have to work with the global scientific world, have always been under suspicion of colluding with western forces when the Russian regime becomes more paranoid," Hall said.
Remarkably, the crackdown targets not only those suspected of conniving with the West but also researchers accused of sharing information with countries considered friendly to Moscow. Shipliouk was detained following a trip to China, while Zvegintsev was arrested following the publication of a scientific article in an Iranian newspaper.
“Vladimir Putin doesn’t trust anyone,” said Mathers.
The arrests also reflect the secret services' effort to maintain their relevance by stoking the regime's paranoia. "When you use the charge of treason, that means the state gives the FSB additional power and the right to not say anything," Mathers explained.
Hall emphasised that the FSB knows how to present itself as indispensable to the Kremlin. In 2012, FSB director Alexander Bortnikov claimed that the forest fires in Siberia were the work of al Qaeda without any proof, using the opportunity to request a budget extension.
Experts suggest that the hypersonic specialists are merely pawns in a larger game of influence within the Kremlin. However, this strategy risks backfiring. Isolating itself from the global scientific community could severely hamper Russian research and technological progress.
"The main goal seems to be to make as shocking as possible an example {of these arrests] so that other scientists are discouraged to work with foreign counterparts," Mathers concluded.
This piece has been translated from the original in French.
