A court in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg has sentenced an engineer who previously worked at the country’s largest battle tank factory to 16 years in prison for treason, independent news outlet SOTAvision reported on Tuesday.
According to investigators, Danil Mukhametov and his wife Viktoria Mukhametova, both of whom worked at UralVagonZavod in the city of Nizhny Tagil in the Sverdlovsk region of the Russian Urals, passed military and technical data to Ukraine that could have been used against the Russian army.
Mukhametov, who admitted partial guilt, was also fined 300,000 rubles (€2,800) and will face further restrictions on his movements for two and a half years once he is released. The prosecutor had requested a sentence of 17 years, local news website 66.ru reported.
Mukhametova, who confessed under interrogation to handing over technical drawings in exchange for 100,000 rubles (€950), was tried separately, having pleaded guilty to the charges against her, and was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison on 11 October.
The Mukhametovs were detained in the spring of 2023, shortly after the arrest of Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, who had travelled to Nizhny Tagil and was accused of collecting secret information about the factory on the orders of the CIA, according to Reuters.
Mukhametov’s case was heard by Judge Andrey Mineyev, who also sentenced Gershkovich to 16 years in prison for espionage in July before he was released a month later in the largest ever prisoner swap between Russian and the West.