MOSCOW, August 30. /TASS/. The Moscow City Court on September 5, will hand a sentence to Ivan Safronov, an adviser to the head of Roscosmos, former correspondent for the Kommersant and Vedomosti dailies, accused of high treason, the defendant's lawyer Dmitry Katchev told TASS on Tuesday.

"The court has retired to the deliberation room. The verdict is scheduled for 16:00 on September 5," the lawyer said. Earlier, the state prosecutor demanded that Safronov be found guilty and sentenced to 24 years in a tight security penitentiary and a fine of 500 thousand rubles.

Safronov was arrested on July 7, 2020 and charged with high treason. He pleaded not guilty. According to his own testimonies, he was engaged exclusively in journalistic activities and had no access to state secrets. For this reason, he says, the charges against him are groundless. He is accused of spying in collaboration with an accomplice.

According to investigators, that other person was political scientist Demuri Voronin to whom Safronov handed some information about the activities of the Russian Armed Forces in Syria. Voronin, in turn, sent it to representatives of Switzerland's Zurich University and Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND). Voronin's lawyer Ivan Pavlov (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia) said the federal security service FSB argued that the data could have been used to analyze the activities of Russian troops in Syria. As follows from the case files, Pavlov said, Voronin paid a reward of $248 to Safronov."

Also, "the investigation has documented evidence that during a long period, in 2015-2019, Safronov was looking for and collecting secret and top secret information, including information concerning Russia's military-technical cooperation with CSTO member-states, as well as the countries of the Middle East, Africa and the Balkan Peninsula," the charges say. According to the prosecution, Safronov systematically passed the collected information to agents of foreign intelligence services, aware that this information could be used by NATO member-states to the detriment of Russia's security. The Prosecutor General's Office believes that Safronov committed the illegal actions in exchange for a material reward. Also, he used encryption methods.