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November 3rd, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Russia’s intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), has accused a former governmental advisor and a journalist of providing Germany with confidential information regarding the activities of the Russian military stationed in Syria.
Ivan Safronov, who was the advisor to the head of Russia’s Roscosmos State Space Agency and was formerly a reporter for the newspapers Kommersant and Vedomosti, was arrested on 7 July 2020 over charges of espionage and treason. According to the FSB, a Czech intelligence agent recruited him in 2012 with the purpose of collecting information regarding Russian forces in the Middle East and some of its military activities in certain African countries.
Through his alleged work with the Czech Republic’s Office for Foreign Relations and Information, Safronov was further accused of enabling the United States to attain intelligence regarding Russian forces. Safronov has denied those allegations and pleaded not guilty, however, with one of his lawyers telling the Russian news agency TASS that “what the investigators view as high treason actually constituted regular journalist work.”
Yesterday, it was reported that the FSB completed the investigation against Safronov and gave the case files to him and his lawyers before being submitted to the prosecution for approval. One of his lawyers, Ivan Pavlov, informed reporters that, alongside the previous charges, a new charge has been filed against the defendant.
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According to Pavlov, the new accusation is that Safronov provided information of Russian forces in Syria to a political scientist named Demuri Veronin. Veronin is accused of then passing that information on to officials from Zurich University in Switzerland and Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND).
The FSB consequently also slapped the charge of high treason on Veronin—a holder of both Russian and German nationality, who was a consultant in Berlin’s Bundestag—which sheds further light on the reasons for his arrest in February this year.
While the case against both Safronov and Veronin is ongoing, the FSB’s accusations appear to be the first such charge of espionage regarding Russia’s military presence in Syria. Throughout much of the ongoing decades-long conflict in the country, Moscow has supported and militarily assisted the regime of Bashar Al-Assad.
The case also further reveals the increasing covert tensions between Russia and its European neighbours— such as the Czech Republic and Germany— who are part of the NATO military alliance rivalling Moscow.
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