MOSCOW — A Russian court on Wednesday convicted two professors of a St.Petersburg university of handing over missile secrets to China, the latest in a string of espionage cases that reflected underlying tensions between Moscow and Beijing despite declarations of cooperation and friendship.
The St.Petersburg City
Court found Yevgeny Afanasyev and Svyatoslav Bobyshev guilty of treason
and sentenced them to 12 ½ and 12 years in prison respectively,
according to the Interfax news agency.
The two professors of
St.Petersburg’s Baltic State Technological University were accused of
selling confidential information related to Russia’s
latest intercontinental ballistic missile, the Bulava, to
representatives of China’s military intelligence. The two men have been
in custody since their arrest in March 2010.
After decades of Cold
War-era rivalry, Moscow and Beijing have developed what they call a
strategic partnership after the 1991 Soviet collapse. China also has
become a major customer for Russian weapons industries, although Russian
arms exports have drained in recent years as China has sought to
produce unlicensed copycat versions of Russian weapons.
Russia
also has refrained from providing China with some of the latest
military technologies, and a number of Russian scientists have been
convicted of spying for China in recent years.
The Bulava,
designed to equip a new generation of Russian nuclear submarines,
suffered a string of failures during its development phase but recent
test launches went successfully.
Interfax said that the professors
were accused of providing the Chinese with technological details
related to the Bulava’s underwater launch during their trip to China in
2009. It said that Chinese intelligence also sought information about
the land-based Topol-M and Iskander missiles.
