A Russian-Swedish sixty-year-old appears in court in Stockholm on Monday, suspected of having transmitted Western technologies for almost ten years to Russian military intelligence services.
Sergei Skvortsov, who settled in Sweden with his wife in the 1990s, is accused of having used the import-export companies of electronic components that he managed for his spy activities.
This trial comes against a backdrop of increased concerns among Swedish authorities for national security, a few months after the conviction of a former Swedish intelligence agent for aggravated espionage for Russia.
Sergei Skvortsov will appear before judges for “illegal intelligence activities” to the detriment of Sweden and the United States, after an investigation by the Swedish police carried out with the help of the American FBI.
The trial is scheduled to last until September 25 but will partly take place behind closed doors for national security reasons.
Sergei Skvortsov, holder of dual Russian and Swedish nationality, faces up to four years in prison. His lawyer, Ulrika Borg, told AFP that his client “denies any criminal act”.
The man was arrested at dawn on November 22, 2022, in his house in an upscale suburb of Stockholm during a spectacular operation by police commando units that mobilized two helicopters.
Placed in detention since then, the accused is suspected of having organized “the acquisition of information and the effective acquisition of various products that the Russian state and the defense forces could not acquire on the open market due to export rules and sanctions”.
He would have spied on the United States since the 1er January 2013 and Sweden since 1er July 2014, until his arrest.
“He posed a serious risk to national security interests, both in Sweden and in the United States,” prosecutor Henrik Olin told AFP.
“You only need to look at the battlefield in Ukraine to see that the Russian military-industrial complex needs this,” he added.
Swedish Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer considered the charges against the suspect “extremely serious”.
American sector?
In 2016, American justice arrested and tried, mainly in New York, people who supplied the Russian military system with electronic devices.
“The analysis of the American authorities is that the accused took over from these people,” added Mr. Olin.
Swedish investigators found emails from the Russian Defense Ministry sent to Skvortsov and seized from his home computers, hard drives, USB sticks and mobile phones, listed among 81 pieces of evidence disclosed in the indictment .
Just after the couple’s arrest in 2022, the Russian Foreign Ministry considered that it was a new act of “anti-Russian hysteria on the part of the West”.
The Swedish Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson, judged on the contrary in July that his country was facing “the most serious situation from a security point of view since the Second World War”.
“Countries and state actors could take advantage of the situation,” he said. The Swedish Minister of Justice considered that Russia, along with Iran and China, was among the threats.
The trial comes shortly after the conclusion of another spectacular espionage case for Russia.
In January, Swedish justice sentenced a former Swedish intelligence agent to life imprisonment, found with his brother guilty of “aggravated espionage”.
Peyman Kia, 42, was on trial for having collected sensitive information which his younger brother then transmitted to the GRU, between 2011 and 2021.
The affair has been described as the biggest espionage scandal in recent Swedish history, a sign of Russian espionage infiltrating the heart of Swedish intelligence.
