Russia's prosecutor general's office said Friday it had sentenced Vadim Golda, an employee of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe mission in eastern Ukraine, to 14 years in prison on charges of “espionage” for “foreign intelligence services.”
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The 56-year-old “security assistant to the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission” in eastern Ukraine was convicted of “espionage” and sentenced to “14 years in a strict regime penal colony,” the prosecutor's office said in a press release.
According to the prosecution, in 2021, before the large-scale Russian attack in February 2022, Vadim Golda collected “data on industrial facilities that were then hit by missiles” from Ukraine. He was arrested in April 2022.
The Russian Prosecutor General's Office, in its press release posted on Telegram, specified that the OSCE employee had cooperated with “foreign intelligence services,” without identifying them or providing evidence.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, created in the midst of the Cold War to promote dialogue between East and West, on Friday “unequivocally” condemned the sentence against its employee and called for his “immediate release” and two other members of the organization, who were sentenced by a Russian court in September 2022 to 13 years in prison.
Since the start of the military offensive in Ukraine, Russian authorities have increased arrests on charges of espionage, treason or collaboration with Ukraine as part of a wide-ranging campaign of repression.
Russia had prevented the renewal of the OSCE Permanent Mission to Ukraine in 2022, as well as the extension of the mission that followed the conflict between Kiev and the separatists armed and led by Moscow in Donbass (eastern Ukraine) since 2014.
Russia's powerful security service, the FSB, said Friday it had arrested an “agent” of Ukrainian military intelligence in annexed Crimea, accused of “transmitting information about the locations of deployments” of Moscow's forces on the peninsula, Russian news agencies reported.
The man, whose identity has not been released, faces up to 20 years in prison, according to authorities.
