Director of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ITAM SB RAS) Alexander Shiplyuk, who was arrested in August 2022 in a criminal case of treason, is accused of transferring classified materials to China. It is reported by Reuters, citing sources familiar with the case.
The investigation claims that the scientist handed over the materials at a scientific conference held in China in 2017. Shiplyuk himself says that this information was freely available and insists on his own innocence, the sources say. The nature of the accusations against Shiplyuk was not previously reported.
On May 24, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Kremlin does not see in the case of scientists accused of espionage the tendencies of their work in favor of China.
In 2022, two more Siberian scientists were accused of treason and passing secret data to China. One of them, physicist Dmitry Kolker, was sent to a pre-trial detention center with terminal cancer; he died on the third day after his arrest. On suspicion of treason, the chief researcher of ITAM SB RAS Anatoly Maslov was also detained. Kolker was accused by the FSB of disclosing state secrets at lectures he gave in China. Maslov is charged with transferring data related to hypersound to China.
On April 7, 2023, the chief researcher of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences Valery Zvegintsev was arrested. In 2001, he founded and headed the laboratory "Aerogasdynamics of high speeds" at the institute. In 2006, Alexander Shiplyuk became the head of this laboratory. Alexander Maslov for more than twenty years was the deputy director of the institute for scientific work, in charge of the aerodynamic direction. All three were co-authors of articles.
As T-invariant found out , Shiplyuk, Zvegintsev and Maslov participated in the projects of the seventh framework program of the European Union "TransHyBerian", coordinator of which was the Belgian Von Karman Institute of Hydrodynamics. According to the sources of the publication, the contacts of scientists with China and Iran are only an excuse, not the reason for the arrests.
The publication recalls that for the first time a version about the connection of scientists studying hypersonic technologies with the use of these technologies in the Avangard and Kinzhal combat missile systems was made in a note by Kommersant in June 2018 in connection with the accusation of treason of a scientist from the Central Scientific and Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering (TsNIIMash) Viktor Kudryavtsev. At the time of his arrest, he had not had access to secret work for more than ten years. It was about his cooperation in the TransHyBerian project of the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union.
Kudryavtsev was the coordinator of this project from his institute. The project was carried out from 2011 to 2013. Another participant in the project was the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute named after Professor N. E. Zhukovsky (TsAGI), in which Anatoly Gubanov, arrested in December 2020, and Valery Golubkin, arrested in April 2021, worked. The third participant of this international project from the Russian side was the ITAM. Khristianovich SB RAS. Alexander Maslov, who was later arrested, was appointed coordinator from the Novosibirsk Institute.
Kolker, who was arrested under the same article and died in the pre-trial detention center, does not have joint scientific work with physicists from the ITAM named after I.I. Khristianovich, his latest work was not related to hypersonic topics. But the publication notes that Kolker had another affiliation with the organization in which he worked – Special Technologies LLC, whose main activity is, in particular, "the creation of laser sources in the mid-IR range for guidance and countermeasure systems." This affiliation is indicated in the publication of Dmitry Kolker in 2012, just at the time when work was underway on the project in the EU framework program. There is no information about whether Kolker's work of that period intersected with the work of colleagues from ITAM, but the fact that they were worried about the issues of increasing the frequency of lasers in hypersonic experiments can be seen from publications of the same time.
According to one of the members of the expert commission, similar to those that give access to external publications of ITAM, if all those arrested associated with participation in this EU project, as well as Dmitry Kolker, were involved in the development of the "Dagger", they would have a different level secrecy, they would not have such free international contacts and open publications. “Most likely they fell into the “dual-use technology trap”. This happens when scientists who have access to closed topics come to the attention of law enforcement agencies, because law enforcers find links to their open work in data obtained from closed sources, for example, from special reports, ”the source of the publication suggests.