A prominent Russian scientist specialising in hypersonic technology has been sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of treason. His conviction is the latest in a series of arrests targeting researchers since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, in what experts are calling a politically motivated crackdown on scientists.
Russian scientists Alexander Shipliouk, Anatoly Maslov, and Valery Zvegintsev have more in common than just their roles as leading physicists in hypersonic missile development, one of their country’s technological strengths.
In recent months, all three men have been accused of high treason and detained by Russian authorities.
On September 3, a Moscow court sentenced Shipliouk, the former director of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM) in Siberia, to 15 years in a high-security prison. The closed-door trial found him guilty of sharing “classified information” at a scientific conference in China in 2017. Shipliouk claims that the data he presented was already in the public domain.
His colleague at ITAM, 78-year-old Maslov, who specialises in hypersonic flight, used the same argument after being sentenced to 14 years in prison in May. He too was charged with treason for passing on sensitive information during trips overseas.
Meanwhile, Zvegintsev, another hypersonic expert from the same institute, was arrested last spring and remains in pre-trial detention. Russian authorities only confirmed his arrest after a group of Russian scientists publicly expressed concern for their colleagues in an open letter published last May.
An escalating crackdown on scientists
Researchers at the Novosibirsk-based ITAM are not the only ones who have been targeted by Russian authorities. Alexander Kuranov, an engineer who led a key hypersonic aircraft program in the late Soviet era, was sentenced to seven years in prison for treason in April 2024 after spending more than two years in custody.
Since 2018, at least 11 specialists in hypersonic technology have been detained by Russian authorities, according to the BBC.
The crackdown began the year President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia possessed a hypersonic weapon, purportedly demonstrating the country's military superiority over the United States.
Hypersonic missiles are capable of traveling at extremely high speeds and can alter their course mid-flight to evade air defences.
The repression of Russian scientists escalated even further following the onset of the Ukraine war in February 2022.
