The prosecution has requested an 18-year prison sentence for the photographer from Perm accused of state treason.

The prosecution has requested an 18-year prison sentence for Grigory Skvortsov, a photographer from Perm, who is accused of state treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code) over a publicly available book about Soviet bunkers. This was reported by the Telegram channel of his support group.

Skvortsov was detained on 29 November 2023 in Perm, a major city in the Urals. The photographer said that during the arrest, security officers beat and insulted him, and then forced him to provide “information” on camera, prompting him with what exactly to say. The man was remanded in pre-trial detention.

According to the version of the security forces, Skvortsov bought photographs of declassified archive documents as supplementary material for the book “Soviet ‘Secret Bunkers’: Urban Special Fortification 1930s–1960s” by historian Dmitry Yurkov, and then allegedly passed them to an American journalist.

“Here, they’re accusing me that I ‘could have realised’ the secrecy of the sites described in D. Yurkov’s book ‘Soviet Sec. Bunkers’ (which says ‘declassified’ on the cover). I’ve seen someone with a copy like this, so take care with it, warn people not to take such things abroad—they’ve got plenty of room for you over here,” Skvortsov wrote in a letter.

Skvortsov opposes the war in Ukraine.

You can support the defendant by sending them a letter via our “Vestochka” project, the Zonatelecom service, or by ordinary post at the address:

614000, Perm region, Perm, Klimenko St., 24, FKU SIZO-1 GUFSIN of Russia for the Perm region
Skvortsov Grigoriy Alexandrovich, b. 1989

An error has been corrected in this news item. The original version mistakenly stated that the case was initiated because of the book itself, not the photographs related to it.