During a meeting in the Moscow City Court, the prosecutor's office stopped the statements of witnesses for the prosecution in the case of Ivan Safronov, after the testimony of one of them in favor of the journalist. This was reported by Kommersant with reference to lawyer Dmitry Talantov.
According to the newspaper, the prosecutor's office stopped presenting evidence after the testimony of one of the witnesses, who spoke about Safronov's innocence. By this time, the state prosecution had managed to present only six of the 15 witnesses, while «none of them said a word about Safronov's espionage activities.»
The speech of the witness, whose name was not disclosed, took place at the last meeting on Friday, May 13.
According to Kommersant, it is forbidden to disclose the name of this witness due to the secrecy of the process, but with a «high degree of probability» he may be a political scientist, a citizen of Russia and Germany, Demuri Voronin, who was arrested in 2021 on charges of treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code) and pleaded guilty to collaborating with foreign intelligence agencies.
“The common denominator is that he behaved like a journalist, asked questions like a journalist, wrote articles like a journalist, from which only one conclusion follows: he is not a spy or a traitor to the Motherland, but a journalist,” Talanov said about the testimony of the witness.
One of the two charges brought against Safronov is related to Voronin: according to investigators, the journalist gave the political scientist information about the defense capability of the Russian armed forces in Syria for a reward of $248.
«The witness also confirmed that our client was confident in the harmlessness of the information he had collected from open sources — the media and the Internet, confirming that any professional journalist could theoretically collect this data,» Talantov said.
The court began to hear evidence from the defense, today, May 18.
Former journalist of Kommersant and Vedomosti, adviser to the head of Roscosmos Ivan Safronov has been in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center in Moscow since the summer of 2020.
He is accused of treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code). According to the FSB, since 2017, the correspondent has been cooperating with Czech intelligence and passed on “information about Russia’s military-technical cooperation with the Middle East African state.” Details of the charges are not disclosed, all hearings on the case are closed to journalists and listeners.
Journalist Ivan Safronov is on trial for treason — what do we know about the case