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The journalist Ivan Safronov was placed in a punishment cell in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center for three days. About it informs RT with reference to Boris Klin, a member of the Public Monitoring Commission of Moscow.
Wedge said that Safronov was placed in a punishment cell because of an attempt to establish a TV antenna – together with a cellmate, they glued it to the wall.
According to a member of the POC, Safronov complained that he was not allowed to take a sleep mask to the punishment cell, and because of the bright light that is on there all day long, he cannot sleep and his eyes become inflamed.
Earlier on November 2, Safronov was presented new final charge. Another episode was added to the episode with the transfer of information to the “representative of the Czech intelligence”: according to the investigation, in December 2015, he gave political scientist Demuri Voronin some information about the activities of the Russian Armed Forces in Syria. He allegedly forwarded this data to representatives of the University of Zurich in Switzerland and the Federal Intelligence Service of Germany.
According to the FSB, the transmitted information could be used to analyze the actions of Russian troops in Syria. According to the prosecution, Voronin paid Safronov a reward of $ 248 for this information.
Political scientist Demuri Voronin, who has dual citizenship of Russia and Germany, was arrested in February 2021 on charges of high treason. Several dozen Russian political scientists and journalists have collaborated with his consulting agency. The company “Resost”, the former general director and co-owner of which, presumably, is Voronin, has offices in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Berlin. In addition, a knowledgeable source said that Voronin worked for some time as a foreign policy and energy consultant in the German parliament.
Voronin also worked for the German Society for Eastern European Studies (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde eV). This was confirmed to The Insider by the executive director of the company Gabriele Freitag.
According to some reports, after the arrest, he made a confessionary statement, confirming the version of the investigation, Pavlov notes.
“If you look at journalistic work through the eyes of the FSB, the collection and transmission of information is pure espionage,” writes Pavlov. “In this case, a meeting with a foreign colleague can be considered recruitment, a joint investigation is a spy mission, and correspondence in a messenger can be considered as receiving instructions from the special services.”
According to him, the work of a military observer was practically banned after the adoption of the law on official secrets in the defense sphere and the list of prohibited information on the topic of the Ministry of Defense, the military-industrial complex and the space industry approved by the FSB.
After the arrest of Ivan Safronov, journalists are afraid to tackle these topics. According to the Levada Center, 38% of interviewed journalists believe that their personal risks of falling under a criminal investigation under Art. 275 (high treason) are high. Moreover, those who have abandoned “dangerous topics” and even left journalism long ago may become involved in new cases, Pavlov notes. This is evidenced by the Safronov case, which the special services monitored already in 2015.
Safronov, who currently remains in the position of adviser to the head of Roscosmos, has been charged with high treason. He was detained on July 7, 2020 and placed under arrest by a court decision. As Safronov’s lawyers stated immediately after his arrest, the investigation believes that in 2012 the journalist was recruited by a representative of the Czech special service, to whom in 2017 he passed on classified information related to Russia’s military-technical cooperation in African countries and the actions of the Russian Armed Forces in the Middle East. The final recipient of the classified information, according to the investigation, was the United States.
Safronov does not admit guilt and believes that the criminal case is related to his journalistic activities. Before joining Roskosmos, Safronov was a correspondent for the newspapers Kommersant and Vedomosti, specializing, in particular, on the military-industrial complex and the space industry.
Lawyer Ivan Pavlov, representing the interests of Ivan Safronov, was detained in April on charges of disclosing data from the preliminary investigation into the Safronov case. As a preventive measure, Pavlov was assigned a ban on certain actions: he cannot communicate with witnesses in his case, use the Internet and the telephone.
At the end of July, Ivan Safronov was interrogated as a witness in the Pavlov case, after which they lost the opportunity communicate with each other. Pavlov, however, remained Safronov’s representative. In September Pavlov left from Russia, and at the end of October, Russian law enforcement agencies put him on the wanted list.
Lawyer Dmitry Talantov, also representing Safronov’s interests, said on October 31 that he had appealed in court as violating the constitutional right to defense of the investigator’s ban on making any notes when studying the case materials. In a conversation with The Insider, the defense attorney added that FSB investigator Alexander Chaban, who is in charge of the case, does not put any time restrictions on familiarization with the case materials.
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