There was a flurry of excitement this week when, hot on the heels of Ukrainian success stopping seven of the newest Russian Kinzhal missiles, news came of several ‘missile scientists’ having been arrested for treason. Understandably, this led to a common misconception that the one had led to the other, yet another stark example of Putin’s ruthless efficiency and paranoia.
In fact, it was a coincidence. The arrests had occurred before any of the not-actually-hypersonic missiles had been intercepted. Three of the arrests happened last year, and had been reported in the Press immediately after each had occurred.
Missile Threat: CSIS Missile Defense Project
The Kh-47M2 Kinzhal is a nuclear-capable, Russian air-launched ballistic missile, likely derived from Russia’s ground-launched 9K720 Iskander-M. It was one of six “next generation” weapons unveiled by President Putin during a speech in March 2018.
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Following the launch, the Kinzhal rapidly accelerates to Mach 4 (4,900 km/h), and may reach speeds of up to Mach 10 (12,350 km/hr). This speed, in combination with the missile’s erratic flight trajectory and high maneuverability, could complicate interception. It is worth noting that Russia’s designation of the Kinzhal as a “hypersonic” missile is somewhat misleading, as nearly all ballistic missiles reach hypersonic speeds (i.e. above Mach 5) at some point during their flight.
This week’s Press coverage had come after the colleagues of those detained had released an open letter last Monday appealing for restraint, after a fourth arrest last month. They warned that the arrests were motivated by paranoia and that these actions by the authorities were harmful to Russia’s research and development domain.
That the letter was released in the same week that one of Putin’s newest super-duper-weapons had been shown to be less than all that was a matter of chance. Whether it was fortunate for those scientists — in helping to bring attention to their concerns — or the opposite — because it wrongly led to the appearance of a connection — is a matter for conjecture.
The jailed researchers were all fellows of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Siberian Branch, in Novosibirsk. They are all very senior and well respected in their field.
The shameful arrest last June of Dmytri Kolker, formerly a senior researcher at the Institute of Laser Physics and the State Technical University in Novosibirsk, was the first news i’d seen last year.
‘They didn’t even let our family say goodbye’ The FSB sent a terminally ill scientist from a hospital in Siberia to a prison in Moscow. Days later, he died in custody.
Maria Dubrovskaya, Meduza, 6 July 2022
On June 30, a Novosibirsk court arrested scientist Dmitry Kolker on suspicion of treason. Kolker, who had stage IV pancreatic cancer, was receiving treatment at a hospital in Novosibirsk; the authorities took him straight from the hospital to Moscow’s Lefortovo remand prison, where he died on July 2. Kolker’s lawyer, Alexander Fedulov, blames his client’s death on the FSB officers who arrested him, the medical staff who signed off on his remove from the hospital, and the judges who ordered his incarceration, knowing he was near death. Fedulov spoke to Meduza about his client’s case.
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Kolker was arrested on June 30, 2022, for lectures on laser physics he delivered to Chinese students back in 2018. His son, Maxim Kolker, told Taiga.info that his father was charged with disclosing state secrets to China and was threatened with up to 20 years behind bars.
Anatoly Maslov, 75-year-old chief scientist at the Institute’s Siberian Branch, was the next to be arrested, also accused of passing information to China.
Second Russian scientist from Siberian city detained on treason charges
Reuters, 2 July 2022
Russia has detained a second scientist in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on suspicion of state treason in the space of a few days, the TASS news agency reported on Saturday, citing a source close to the investigation.
Anatoly Maslov, a chief scientist at an institute of theoretical and applied mechanics in Novosibirsk, a city around 2,800 km (1,750 miles) east of Moscow, was detained and transferred to a prison in the Russian capital in an investigation by the FSB intelligence agency, TASS reported.
Alexander Shiplyuk, the institute’s director, was then arrested in August.
Scientist in Russia hypersonic missile program jailed, accused of treason
Rebekah Yeager-Malkin, Jurist, 5 August 2022
Russian state-run news agency TASS Friday reported that the Director of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Siberian Branch Alexander Shiplyuk has been jailed for high treason. According to the institute’s scientific director Vasily Fomin, Shiplyuk is faced with charges of high treason after an investigation into the institute.
Shiplyuk appears to have been working on the aerothermal dynamics of hypersonic aircraft with straight jet engines prior to his arrest. Hypersonic missiles and aircraft are an emerging field, and Russia, China and the US are competing to gain an advantage. According to the Carnegie Endowment, hypersonic weapons “travel at least five times faster than the speed of sound.” On May 28, Russia announced its first successful test of its Tsirkon hypersonic missile, which traveled 1,000 km according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Valery Zvegintsev was the latest to be detained, last month.
Another Novosibirsk scientist was suspected of treason
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 16 May 2023
Valery Zvegintsev - the founder of the laboratory "Aerogasdynamics of high speeds" of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences - became a suspect in the case of high treason. This became known from an open letter from the staff of the Insititute.
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Valery Zvegintsev founded the laboratory "Aerogasdynamics of high speeds" in 2001, and before that his team was engaged in the creation of an adiabatic compression wind tunnel AT-303. In 2006, Zvegintsev was replaced as head of the laboratory by Alexander Shiplyuk, who later headed the institute.
That Shiplyuk, who was arrested last year, had replaced Zvegintsev several years ago suggests that the latter had retired. It’s not at all unusual for counterintelligence to investigate personnel who have long since moved on. And, given the earlier arrests, and the appearance (to FSB eyes, at least) of something beyond a lone ‘bad apple’ at the institute, it’s not surprising that the investigation has continued to roll up victims.
Were they all really spying for China?
Although China has been making great efforts to get hold of the technologies of other nations — as has Russia for many decades — it seems unlikely to me that this one institute would harbour a ring of spies. And spies at such a high level, at that.
I think a more likely explanation is that an investigation — precipitated by what is anyone’s guess — has been charging down one after the other false leads. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the FSB and prosecutors have simply refused to credit their victims’ innocence despite not being able to pin anything on them. Again, we don’t know what evidence of espionage sparked the investigation, nor what may have come up in the process to shine an unsparing light on each new suspect. It’s a hazard of the profession that wherever a counterintelligence organisation is at work one can be sure that a ‘witch hunt’ will eventually arise.
Perhaps one of them is guilty, or maybe none of them. But it’s obvious that the FSB is on the trail of something. Somehow, some information came to light suggesting they had a leak somewhere.
Misdirection
If one of them is guilty — perhaps Kolker, the first to be arrested, and now no longer available for interrogation — maybe the facts pointing to the recipient of the leak are less than clear. Intelligence organisations prefer to shade the truth, after all. It may be that someone at the institute believed that he was sharing information with a nation other than the one ultimately pulling the strings. Such misdirection is common with espionage.
Does that lend credence to the notion that CIA had received information about the Kinzhal that could have led to its interception? Perhaps, but it’s unclear whether the success of the Patriot batteries was due to any double-super-secret knowledge or just Russian over-confidence in the performance of its new super-weapon.
Shot for treason
Regardless of the truth behind all of this, there was good reason for the misunderstanding that the failure of the Kinzhal had persuaded the Russian government to go after these scientists. Such has been the modus operandi of the Russian secret organs for a long time now. During the Great Patriotic War the very lives of her ablest scientists and engineers — among a great many others — often were held in the balance between success and failure to produce. Ironically, that included replicating technologies that had been stolen from the West. Given that such leaked information could always be riven with deliberate errors — which the leadership was very much paranoid about — failure was seen as not only neglect in uncovering how things should work but also as a clear indication of counter-revolutionary sabotage. Being one of Stalin’s scientists sure wasn’t easy.
The [Manhattan Project Soviet spy Klaus] Fuchs A-bomb drawings were welcome, but the design was still carefully recalculated within the Arzamas-16 facility. Weapons boss Lavrenti Beria was suspicious of disinformation possibly fed into the Soviet system by U.S. counterintelligence. Beria made it clear to his underlings: a failed first test could only be the result of sabotage. He wanted the names of all responsible hands, in advance. That was the execution list in the event of failure.
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By June 1949, Mayak had produced enough plutonium for RDS-1, the first Soviet A-bomb. (The initials stand for /Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Stalina, "Stalin's Rocket Engine.") That device, internally an exact copy of Fat Man, was fired atop a steel tower west of Semipalatinsk on August 29, 1949, fourteen months after the Mayak reactor first went critical. Once again, immediately before the test (known as First Lightning), Lavrenti Beria explained the stakes to Khariton. The scientific director of Arzamas-16 was to be executed if RDS-1 did not work. In later years, Khariton described Beria as "the personification of evil in modern Russian history," but he also gave Beria credit for being "a first-class administrator who could carry a job through to completion." Fortunately for Khariton, RDS-1 did work; it gave twenty-two kilotons, as did Fat Man.
Thomas C Reed and Danny B Stillman, The Nuclear Express (Zenith Press, 2009)