Even bakers aren't safe in Putin's 'traitors' crackdown

Russia’s security services have ensnared numerous scientists and journalists, as well as many ordinary citizens, since 2014

- DASHA LITVINOVA

Over the past decade, Russia has seen a sharp increase in treason and espionage cases. Lawyers and experts say prosecutions for these high crimes started to grow after 2014 – the year when Russia illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula.

That’s also when Moscow backed a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine.

The number of these cases in Russia spiked significantly after the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, urged the security services to “harshly suppress the actions of foreign intelligence services [and] promptly identify traitors, spies and saboteurs”. The crackdown has ensnared scientists and journalists, as well as ordinary citizens.

The following are some of the treason cases prosecuted in Russia in recent years.

Oksana Sevastidi

In April 2008, bakery worker Oksana Sevastidi saw military equipment on a railway near Sochi, the Russian Black Sea resort where she lived. She texted a friend who lived in neighbouring Georgia about it. Weeks later, in August, the two countries fought a brief war, which ended with Moscow recognising South Ossetia and another Georgian province, Abkhazia, as independent states and bolstering its military presence there.

Sevastidi was arrested in 2015 on the basis of her text messages, and convicted of treason the following year. The case made national headlines after Ivan Pavlov and Evgeny Smirnov, prominent lawyers specialising in treason cases, took it on in 2016. That same year, Pavlov’s team revealed that several other women from Sochi had been convicted of treason in eerily similar cases.