The Rossiya 24 TV channel showed a video about journalist Ivan Safronov and his criminal case of treason. The video contains recordings of the journalist’s conversations and interviews with him from the colony.
TV presenter Eduard Petrov was invited to the “Honest Detective” program by FSB investigator Alexander Chaban, who was in charge of Safronov’s case.
Chaban accused journalists and human rights activists of a “total information war” against the investigation. In addition, he repeated the prosecution’s version, according to which Safronov’s “curator” was the Czech journalist Martin Laris.
The story showed correspondence between Safronov and Larysh, in which they discuss work and arrange meetings to drink beer or wine. Safronov, as stated in the program, completed 12 tasks from Larysh, receiving more than 80 thousand euros for this. First of all, the Czech journalist was interested in information about the Russian armed forces and Russian satellites, Chaban added in a conversation with Petrov.
As the BBC Russian Service notes, in court the investigation failed to prove the transfer of 80 to Safronov thousand euros.
The story also included several audio recordings — according to the program’s authors, these were wiretapped conversations between Safronov and his loved ones. In one of these recordings, Safronov, in a conversation with his fiancée Ksenia Mironova, mentions that Larysh once called himself a “major of Czech intelligence.”
In another conversation, Safronov and his ex-girlfriend, journalist Taisiya Bekbulatova, mention the word “treason”, saying that Safronov could possibly frame his colleague.
All these audio recordings were used as evidence in a criminal case, the program says.
The episode of Safronov’s collaboration with political scientist Demuri Voronin, who has Russian and German citizenship, is covered in less detail, and Voronin’s interview from the pre-trial detention center is shown fragmentarily. The FSB believes that, through Voronin, the journalist conveyed then-secret data on the Russian operation in Syria to German intelligence.
At the end of the film, an interview with Safronov himself is shown in a colony in the Krasnoyarsk Territory; judging by the footage from the video, the shooting took place in the summer. The journalist denies his guilt in the criminal case and jokes that, according to the security forces, he “sold his homeland for beer.” “None of this proved signs of espionage,” Safronov emphasizes.
According to Safronov, his criminal prosecution is either an investigative error or a deliberate act in someone else’s interests; The journalist did not name the names of potential “interested parties” on camera.
In September 2022, Safronov was sentenced to 22 years in a maximum security colony and a fine of half a million rubles in the case of high treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code). Before the criminal case, the journalist wrote about the Russian defense industry in various publications — in particular, in Vedomosti and Kommersant.