INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
A court in Russia's Sverdlovsk region has sentenced a man to 12 years in a high-security penal colony for donating about $25 to the
Ukrainian military, the independent Mediazona news website reported Monday.Prosecutors alleged that Yevgeny Varaksin, 27, a resident of the
Regional Court ordered Varaksin to pay a fine of 300,000 rubles ($3,650) and serve 1.5 years of probation.Varaksin had partially admitted
his guilt, according to the state prosecutor.The judge in Varaksin's case, Judge Andrei Mineyev, previously sentenced Wall Street Journal
journalist and former Moscow Times reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in prison on espionage charges
Gershkovich was freed in August 2024 as part of a major prisoner exchange between Moscow and the West.According to Mineyev, Varaksin was
Rosatom's nuclear weapons complex, in 2022.The number of treason cases and convictions in Russia has significantly risen since the
That figure is nearly four times higher than the number of convictions in 2023 and the highest recorded in modern Russian history, the
