People walk past trees covered with ice after freezing rain in the far eastern city of Vladivostok, Russia. Reuters

Russia has sentenced a man to 13 years in prison for trying to pass military secrets about Russia’s Northern Fleet to the US Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Friday.

The FSB said in a statement that a court in Bryansk, southwest of Moscow, had found Yuri Eschenko guilty of state treason on Nov.17 and sentenced him to 13 years in a high-security facility.

Eschenko pleaded guilty and said he regretted what he had done, the FSB said. Reuters could not immediately reach a lawyer for him.

Eschenko, working in the town of Severomorsk, had a job servicing radio-electronic systems used by the Northern Fleet’s ships.

The FSB said he had copied secret documents related to weapons systems used by the Northern Fleet. He had done the copying from 2015 to 2017 with a view to selling the information on to a third party, it said.

In 2019, the FSB said he had made contact with the CIA. He was arrested in July by the FSB in the Bryansk region trying to hand over the state secrets, it said.

Reuters