Russian citizen gets 13 years in jail for attempt to sell military secrets to CIA

MOSCOW: A former employee of the Russian defense sector was sentenced to 13 years in prison for attempts to sell military secrets to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Friday.

From 2015-2017, Yury Eschenko, who then worked for a company in charge of maintenance of the Northern Fleet vessels' radioelectronic systems, copied secret documentation related to weapons used by the Northern Fleet, as he wanted to leak the information to the US for lucrative purposes. In early 2019, Eschenko establish contact with the CIA, and already in July he was detained in Russia's central Bryansk region, bordering Ukraine and Belarus, during the attempt to pass the military secrets to the CIA.

"On November 17, 2020, the Bryansk regional court found Russian Federation citizen Yury Alexandrovich Eschenko guilty of committing high treason (Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code). The court sentenced Eschenko to 13 years of imprisonment in a high-security prison," the FSB said in a statement.

Eschenko acknowledged the offense, according to the statement.