Is a big international arms deal behind the trial of Ivan Safronov?
Is a big international arms deal behind the trial of Ivan Safronov?
FSB case files indicate the reporter is being prosecuted for his journalism, not for treason.
On Tuesday this week, at a hearing in Moscow City Court of the treason case against journalist Ivan Safronov, the prosecution demanded he be given 24 years behind bars – just a year less than the maximum possible sentence.
The BBC can reveal that the criminal case against Safronov, a special correspondent for Russian news outlets Kommersant and Vedomosti, is directly connected to his journalistic work.
Safronov’s article about the export of Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets to Egypt caused an uproar in Cairo’s defence ministry – and evidence of its unhappiness that the aircraft deal had been revealed lies at the heart of the case today. The FSB questioned witnesses precisely about this item of Safronov’s work.
For the two years or more that the he has been in pre-trial custody at Moscow’s secret police prison, Lefortovo, both the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Kremlin have insisted that the accusation of treason against him has nothing to do with Safronov’s work as a journalist.
Even President Putin said as much: “He’s not some kind of dissident journalist who’s fighting with the authorities - which is why he got found out, nabbed and put in jail. In no way has it anything to do with his journalistic activities.”
It turns out from the indictment, published on Monday by the ‘Proekt’ media outlet (designated by Russian authorities as an undesirable organisation in 2021), that the FSB strove to ensure all case witnesses gave evidence that Safronov’s criminal activity in ‘extracting information’ was unconnected to journalism.
Safronov is accused of collaborating with a Czech citizen, Martin Laris, and a German political scientist, Demuri Voronin. According to the FSB, the journalist may have handed over to them seven files of secret information about military-technical cooperation between Russia and a number of other countries. The FSB deems both foreigners to be spies. Yet virtually all the information that Safronov ‘handed over’ to them, and which the case investigators classify as state secrets, can be found in open sources on the internet and in the media, according to ‘Proekt’.
However, the BBC has discovered that the investigation into Safronov for state treason only began after the scandal connected to his exclusive 2019 publication. We are in possession of Russian translations of two letters from Egyptian officials to the Russian Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation (FSVTS). They were forwarded to us by an anonymous source with access to the correspondence. The letters were sent in the spring of 2019, after the publication in Kommersant of the article about supplying Su-35 jets to Egypt, co-written by Safronov with his colleague, Aleksandra Dzhordzhievich.
These same letters are among the case files concerning treason against Ivan Safronov, his lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov confirmed to the BBC. And from the published indictment it’s clear that it was precisely about this text – about jets for Egypt’s air force – that the FSB investigators were keen to talk to witnesses.
Why Egypt’s generals called for censorship in Russia
On March 18th 2019, an article came out in the Kommersant newspaper headlined ‘Su-35 will boost Egypt’s strength’. Moscow had signed a deal with Cairo to supply Su-35 fighter jets – more than 20, according to the paper - with airborne weaponry worth around US $2 billion. Kommersant referred to two top managers in the arms industry who had spoken about the contract on condition of anonymity. We have asked the FSVTS for comment.
On the day the article came out, many other top media, including state-owned outlets, picked up the story – including ‘Izvestia’, Interfax, the defence ministry TV channel ‘Zvezda’, and many others. All based their story on the Kommersant exclusive. The news was also carried by a state broadcaster in Khabarovsk, in Russia’s far east, which said that according to the newspapers, the nearby Komsomolsk-on-Amur aviation factory was about to be flooded with work to fulfil Egypt’s aircraft order.
Interfax, citing a source, even said that ‘aircraft production for Egypt is already underway’ – thereby confirming the truth of Safronov’s article.
But the piece by Safronov and Dzordzievich was also read by the very people who had placed the order for the fighters. On the day of publication, Egypt’s military attaché in Moscow, General Mohammed Mansi, sent a letter – a translated copy of which has been seen by the BBC – to the FSVTS about the news of the delivery of Su-35s. In the letter, the general asked Russia to ‘take all necessary steps and actions to deny the news cited above’. It was necessary, according to the attaché, in consideration of the ‘current political situation in Russia and Egypt’.
A second letter to the FSVTS, which the BBC also has a copy of (in Russian translation), was then drafted by the head of Egypt’s defence ministry armaments directorate, Major-General Tareq Saad Zaghlul. The tone here was rather stronger. It noted that the news about the signing of a jet contract with Egypt had reached the head of the country’s general staff while he was on a visit to the United States. The letter went on to say that it had ‘put the general command of Egypt’s armed forces in an awkward position’.
In 2019, the head of Egypt’s general staff was Mohammed Farid Hegazi, and the BBC couldn’t find any information about such a visit to the US. But on March 20-22, two defence ministry delegations from Egypt and the US had indeed met in Washington, according to the Pentagon. There’s nothing about a contretemps between them, but the Kommersant article made it clear that there could well have been. By purchasing fighters from Moscow, Egypt was at risk of falling foul of the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which includes sanctions for cooperating with Russia’s military-industrial complex.
In Maj-Gen Zaghlul’s letter to the FSVTS, he says Egypt has repeatedly requested Russian colleagues ‘take steps to ensure information about the sphere of military cooperation and associated contracts remained unpublished.’
The story in Kommersant about the Su-35s, according to Zaghlul, was either an attempt to convey political information to third countries, which Cairo was concerned about; or it was a coincidence ‘excused by freedom of the press’, because of which Egypt ‘finds itself in an awkward position before other parties from the standpoint of politics and security’.
He added at the end of it that publishing news about military cooperation with Egypt ‘will negatively affect all current contracts between the parties’ and may lead to ‘unwelcome results’.
‘Egypt is under pressure to maintain the balance of relations with other states’, the letter notes.
Subsequently, Zaghlul wrote that ‘Egypt for its part states that Russia must assume full responsibility’ for any consequences for the execution of the contracts following their disclosure in the media. The Egyptian general concludes his letter by asking his Russian colleagues to ‘level a ban on the publication by any organ of state/official/media outlet of news or statements regarding military cooperation between the two countries’.
How Safronov’s treason case grew from a contract with Egypt
The BBC doesn’t know why these letters appeared among the materials of the Safronov case, considering that the accusation that he collaborated with ‘Czech and German intelligence agents’ has nothing to do with the sale of Su-35s to Egypt. Lawyers said that the matter of Su-35 sales to Egypt didn’t come during the FSB investigative work, or during the legal process.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of documents at the heart of the indictment date only from the spring of 2019, according to its official text. It is also the case that secret service agents only accessed the files on Safronov’s home computer in late May and early June of 2019.
How the FSVTS reacted to the letters from the Egyptian military is not known. We have requested comment. Likewise, nothing is known of the fate of the contract in question – there has been no official information about the supply of fighters to Cairo.
As early as April 9th 2019, at hearings in the US senate, the then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that Washington would punish Cairo under the CAATSA for any purchase of Su-35s from Russia. He had been asked before the hearing by senators from both political parties to put written pressure on Egypt to disavow the purchase of fighters from Russia. At the time, Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was on a visit to Washington. Pompeo told the senators he believed the Egyptian leader had heard the warning.
Pompeo and the then head of the Pentagon again warned Sisi in writing in November 2019 of the consequences were Egypt to purchase Russian fighters. The letter from Pompeo and the defence minister was addressed to Egypt’s minister of defence and military manufacturing, Muhammed Zaki, revealed The Wall Street Journal. It stated that major military deals with Russia ‘as a minimum would complicate’ any such transactions between Egypt and the USA.
“Just like our Egyptian friends, the majority of Russia’s partners in the world prefer to make their own decisions,” commented Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. “They are guided by the relationship between price and quality.”
In May of 2020, Russia’s state news agency TASS wrote that according to a military-diplomatic source, Russia had already begun to manufacture the cutting edge Su-35 fighters for the contract with Egypt. The article included a link to the ‘Kommersant’ piece about the deal.
In July, even after Safronov’s arrest, leading media drew attention to the first photos published of the jets destined for Egypt. In June and December of 2021, the aircraft had been photographed at the Zhukovsky aviation research aerodrome outside Moscow.
In January 2022, the French publication Air & Cosmos published a piece by a consultant and analyst at the government research institute, L'Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense Nationale. Antoine Boissy suggested that satellite photographs led him to believe that the Su-35s destined for Egypt were standing on the grounds of the Komsomolsk-on-Amur factory. There had been 11 in June 2021 – by December there were 15. Boissy believed they were the Egyptian jets because the camouflage matched that of Mig 29M/M2 planes that Russian had previously supplied to Egypt.
On a satellite image of the factory in 2022, a BBC correspondent counted 20 Su-35s in exactly the camouflage the French expert had described as Egyptian.
What the accusation says about Safronov’s work at ‘Kommersant’
Investigators contacted at least two people with access to state secrets in connection with Safronov’s article, according to the indictment published in the media. The former deputy director of the FSVTS, Konstantin Biryulin, and the press secretary of Russia’s military export agency, Rosoboronexport, Vyacheslav Davidenko. The latter, according to the document, stated that ‘Safronov frequently phoned him, trying to ferret out questions to do with military-technical cooperation’. It was ‘a similar thing, according to Davidenko, regarding the supply of Su-35s to Egypt. He said that ‘the Main Military Prosecutor’s office conducted an investigation and a commission of enquiry was formed at Rosoboronexport’. The indictment says nothing of the results, and nothing public is known of them.
The journalist’s interest in the Egyptian contract was also confirmed to investigators by retired colonel Konstantin Biryulin, whose stepping down as deputy head of the FSVTS back in 2016 was announced in the pages of Kommersant by Safronov.
Biryulin spoke of ‘one of the telephone calls’ he had with Safronov and even named the date – March 17th 2019, ten days before the article came out. Allegedly on that day Safronov ‘unsuccessfully tried to extract information about the number of Su-35s to be supplied by Russia’. That said, Biryulin himself at that point had stopped working for the agency three years previously. In the indictment, he’s named as an official of the Tactical Rocket Forces. The investigation does not say whether he might he have had access to secret information about the fighter sale.
The indictment also mentions a letter from the Kommersant publishing house of October 25th 2021, which says the piece from 2019 about the Su-35s, and four other articles published in 2014 and 2015, were ‘blocked’ on the newspaper’s website. They had been taken down at the request of the media regulator, Roskomnadzor, according to a witness statement by the deputy editor in chief of ‘Kommersant’, Alexander Stukalin. No explanation for the demand is cited in the indictment from within either the letter or Stukalin’s evidence.
Still, the investigators came to the conclusion that the blocked articles ‘contained information constituting a state secret’; which was why the media regulator blocked access to them. The indictment contains no references to concrete documents from Roskomnadzor confirming this.
The norm by which the disclosure of a state secret can be brought to trial appeared in the criminal code only in 2016. Yet somehow the investigators claim that Safronov from 2014 ‘had had negative experience of publishing secret information’.
Meanwhile, in the archives of Kommersant, you can still find dozens of similar articles about Russia’s military cooperation written by Ivan Safronov over the course of eight years – including ones about Egypt. As far back as 2011, the head of Rosoboronexport Anatoly Isaikin publicly answered a question in an interview by the journalist about the ‘collapse of exports to Libya, Tunisia and Egypt’.
In 2012, Safronov wrote that Egypt was buying American tanks, and that for Russia this market was practically closed. In 2013, he wrote about the investigation by Transparency International into countries including Egypt where the chief issue was a lack of ‘elementary accountability in military procurement matters’.
In 2016, Safronov covered the supply of parts for the ‘Antey 2500’ anti-ballistic missile system to Egypt, ordered as part of a package contract worth $3.5 billion. It included the delivery of several divisions of Buk-M2E systems, helicopter technology, Kornet-E man-portable anti-aircraft missile systems, and other weaponry. At the time, the signing of a contract for 46 MiG-35 planes, worth $2 billion, was also anticipated.
In 2017, Safronov was co-author of an article that said Russia was about to begin delivery to Egypt of Ka-52 attack helicopters. And in 2018, Safronov was the first to write about how on November 3rd a MiG-29M/M2, supplied to Egypt in 2018 as part of a commercial contract, crashed during a training flight.
Was there ever a state secret in the first place?
At the Lima-2019 arms show in Malaysia, on March 26th 2019, the deputy head of Rosoboronexport Sergei Kornev told Interfax news agency that the contract mentioned in the Kommersant article had yet to be signed. Kommersant then quoted the comment in a piece referring to the March 18th news piece.
In April, Kommersant was caught up in a furore about another piece Safronov had played a part in. It was about the possible reshuffle of senior political figures: the removal of Valentina Matvienko from the post of senate speaker in favour of the head of the external intelligence service, the SVR, Sergei Naryshkin. A month later, on May 20th , Safronov had to resign from Kommersant for refusing to disclose to his editors at the newspaper who his sources were.
The very next day, May 21st, a Moscow courthouse registered a claim by the media regulator against Kommersant. The newspaper was threatened with a fine from 400,000 to one million roubles for ‘disclosing information constituting a state or other specially protected secret’.
Representatives of Kommersant did not say what had prompted the accusation by the regulator. Then, on June 3rd, Forbes magazine noticed that the March 18th 2019 article by Safronov about supplying Su-35s to Egypt had disappeared from Kommersant’s website. Safronov told Forbes then that he had received no documents or notifications about the matter.
Four days after the Forbes article was published, the court in Moscow closed the case – it chose not to review it. As the then head of the Kommersant legal department Georgi Ivanov put it, the court had recognised that in the charge by the regulator ‘there was no description of the crime – or rather, there was nothing about what any crime had consisted of’.
Meanwhile, on Kommersant’s website, there are still articles that cover the same details of the contract with Egypt that the FSB decided was a state secret. A story headlined ‘Egypt to purchase dozens of Russian Su-35 fighters’ was published on the site after the newspaper came out that morning of March 18th 2019.
‘“Russia has signed a contract with Egypt for the delivery of several dozen heavy multi-functional Su-35 fighters valued at $2 billion,” two top defence industry officials told Kommersant’, the article reads.
This information, that caused such displeasure among the Egyptians and resulted in a journalist being accused of treason, remains openly available online three years later.
Translated by Chris Booth.
Read this story in Russian here.