Court sentences IT entrepreneur Ilya Sachkov to 14 years behind bars for treason

A court in Moscow has sentenced Ilya Sachkov, the founder of Group-IB IT startup, to 14 years behind bars for treason, as per RTVI.

He was also fined 500,000 rubles (€5,000). The prosecutor requested 18 years in prison for Sachkov.

“This number does not prevent me from doing what I must with a smile, dignity and clear cold-blooded professionalism. All my life I have been working with numbers and codes, and none of them has ever made me stupor.

Sachkov said after the prosecutor’s request.

Sachkov has been in jail since September 2021. According to the investigation, he handed over classified information to a foreign state. Sachkov pleads not guilty.

Bloomberg reported that the trial against Sachkov may be related to the transfer of information about the Fancy Bear hacker group to the US authorities. The group is allegedly linked to Russian intelligence and was involved in cyberattacks during the 2016 US presidential election.

Sachkov announced the Oleg Kashentsov, the head of the second operational department of the Center for Information Security of the FSB had been involved in his persecution, as well as and the former head of this department, Sergey Mikhailov.

In 2019, Mikhailov was sentenced to 22 years in a maximum security prison for treason. He was accused of sharing classified information with the US.

Sachkov says it was he who “drew the attention” of the FSB to Mikhailov’s crimes and acted as a witness during the trial. The entrepreneur believes that the colonel decided to avenge by sharing the information with Kashentsov, which triggered criminal charges.