By Mark Trevelyan
May 5 (Reuters) – Two Russian physicists involved in research underpinning the development of hypersonic missiles have been found guilty of treason and sentenced to 12-1/2 years each in a penal colony, state media reported on Tuesday.
The trial of Valery Zvegintsev and Vladislav Galkin was the latest in a series of treason cases against scientists researching super-high flight speeds.
President Vladimir Putin has boasted that Russia is a world leader in the production of hypersonic missiles, which it has deployed in the war with Ukraine. The weapons are capable of travelling at up to 10 times the speed of sound to punch through air-defence systems.
Zvegintsev, 82, was a top scientist at the Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM) in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.
Two of his colleagues there, Anatoly Maslov and Alexander Shiplyuk, were jailed for 14 and 15 years respectively in 2024.
Galkin, 71, worked at another Siberian university and had co-authored papers with Zvegintsev and Shiplyuk.
In the past decade, Russia has brought at least 10 treason cases against scientists working in the field of hypersonics, the study of flight at speeds exceeding Mach 5 – over 3,800 mph, or 6,115 km/h.
The men have pleaded not guilty, and supporters have said that their publications and travel to international scientific conferences were cleared in advance by Russian security services.
In a rare open letter in 2023, colleagues of the arrested researchers at ITAM said that the men were innocent and the cases against them were damaging Russian science and deterring young academics from entering the field.
(Reporting by Mark Trevelyan in London; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)
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