Eugene Spector, a Russian-born U.S. citizen, was sentenced to 15 years in a Russian high-security penal colony.
Russia’s FSB intelligence agency said a U.S. citizen sentenced to 15 years in prison this week was found guilty of passing biotechnology secrets to the United States.
In a statement on Friday, the FSB accused Eugene Spector, who was born in Russia and then emigrated to the United States, of acting on behalf of the Pentagon.
“The American, in the interests of the Pentagon and a commercial organization associated with it, collected and passed on to a foreign party various information on biotechnological and biomedical topics, including those constituting state secrets, for the subsequent creation of a system by the United States.” one “High-speed genetic screening of the Russian population,” the FSB said.
Details of the espionage trial against Spector, who was already serving a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence for bribery in Russia, were sparse.
Russian state news agencies reported Tuesday that Spector had been sentenced to 13 years in prison for espionage.
This was added to the existing bribery sentence and commuted to a new 15-year sentence in a maximum security penal colony.
The FSB, which normally says whether a defendant has confessed, has not said how Spector made his case in the closed-door trial.
The US State Department said this week it was aware of reports of a US citizen being sentenced in Russia and was monitoring the situation.
The detention of U.S. citizens in Russia has been a major point of contention between Washington and Moscow as relations between the two countries have deteriorated due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
More than two dozen people were released in August Prisoner exchange agreement Nationals of several countries were involved.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan — two American citizens imprisoned in Russia — were among those released.
