Dzerzhinsky District Court of St. Petersburg in November 2023< /span>arrested a man named Ruslan Semiletko< /span> on charges of treason. Mediazona discovered this in January, when an appeal against the decision was filed with a higher court.
The press service of the St. Petersburg City Court, which today left Semiletko in jail, refused to provide details about the man’s identity. They referred to the closed mode of the meeting.
The FSB and St. Petersburg publications did not report in November about arrests under the article of treason.
Mediazona found the man’s full namesake in the list of graduates of the Sevastopol Naval Institute named after Nakhimov — he graduated from it in 1999 with a degree in navigation. The 47-year-old man indicated on VKontakte that he spent his childhood in Kyiv, and after college he served in the Ukrainian Navy. In 2016, after the annexation of Crimea, he appealed in the court of Simferopol the refusal of the Russian military to grant him a long-service pension, but his claim was not accepted.
Mediazona was unable to contact the man or his relatives and confirm that it was he who was arrested.
In 2023, there was a sharp increase in cases under articles of treason (275 of the Criminal Code), espionage (276 Criminal Code) and under a new article on cooperation with foreign states or organizations (275.1 Criminal Code). According to Mediazona's calculations, at least 101 people were involved in such cases, while a year earlier there were about 20.