MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia sentenced a former Ukrainian soccer player to 12 years in jail on Monday after convicting him of spying for Kyiv at a trial held behind closed doors, a court in Moscow said.
Vasily Vasilenko, who played at Ukrainian soccer clubs Tavriya, Torpedo and Druzhba from 1992-2001 according to Russian media, was detained in October 2019, held on smuggling charges and later charged with spying.
The case details have not been disclosed as authorities say they are classified.
Vasilenko denied the spying charge, the RIA news agency cited a source as saying.
Citing the same source, RIA said he was arrested for trying to obtain decommissioned military equipment produced in the Soviet Union during the 1960s on behalf of the Ukrainian defence ministry.
There was no immediate comment from Ukraine.
Ties between Russia and Ukraine have been fraught since Moscow annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and backed armed separatists in Ukraine’s east.
Russia has since arrested a number of people accused of spying for Ukraine, including a serviceman for Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces in August and a woman in Crimea in November 2019 who worked for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
(Reporting by Tom Balmforth in Moscow and Natalia Zinets in Kyiv; Editing by Alison Williams)
