In Estonia, police have arrested a Russian professor on suspicion of spying for Moscow. The accusation: endangering national security. The man worked at the country’s oldest university.
Estonia’s security authorities have taken a professor into custody on suspicion of spying for Russia. The Russian citizen was arrested on January 3rd and is being held in custody for two months, said the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Baltic EU and NATO country in Tallinn. The man taught at the University of Tartu.
The academic is said to have carried out and facilitated intelligence activities directed against Estonia, the authority’s statement said without further details. He is said to have endangered the country’s national security. The allegations must now be checked. The public prosecutor’s office said it had issued an arrest warrant for the scientist in order to prevent the suspect from escaping and further crimes.
Dozens of cases of Suspicion of espionage in Estonia
The arrest shows, after a few dozen other cases in the past, that Russian intelligence services want to infiltrate various areas of life in the country, including science, said Margo Palloson, head of the Estonian security police, which is leading the investigation. Russia’s intelligence interest in Estonia remains high.
The University of Tartu has launched an investigation into the allegations and terminated the academic’s employment relationship. According to the Estonian science database, the Russian scientist has worked at the country’s largest and oldest university since 2010 – most recently as a professor of international political theory. Before that, he taught in Russia at the Saint Petersburg State University.