Illustrative photo – Adviser to the head of the Roskosmos agency Ivan Safronov at a court in Moscow, July 7, 2020.
Moscow – Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, who was sentenced to more than two dozen last year years in prison for treason due to alleged cooperation with Czech intelligence, he was transferred to a penal colony in Siberia to serve his sentence. With reference to the journalist's family, the Interfax agency informed about it today.
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Last September, a Moscow court sentenced the journalists of the Kommersant and Vedomosti newspapers to 22 years in prison with a strict regime and a fine of 500,000 rubles (about 204,000 crowns) for treason. In December, the Court of Appeal upheld this sentence. Safronov has denied any wrongdoing and attributed the charges to efforts by the Russian secret service to produce spies, when the real ones are hard to catch.
The family of the convict has now said that Safronov was transferred to the IK-7 Arejskoye penal colony near Krasnoyarsk. This is a penal facility with a strict regime, where men who have been sentenced for the first time are placed.
Safronov was arrested in July 2020 by the Russian FSB secret service and accused of treason. They claim that the journalist was recruited by Czech intelligence in 2012. According to the FSB, among other things, Safronov passed on secret information about the supply of Russian weapons to the post-Soviet states, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, and this information could allegedly be used by NATO states against Russia's security.
