MOSCOW—A court in Russia’s far-eastern city of Vladivostok on Friday convicted a former U.S. Consulate worker charged with cooperating with a foreign state and sentenced him to four years and 10 months in prison.
Robert Shonov, a Russian citizen and former employee of the U.S. Consulate in Vladivostok, was arrested in May 2023. Russia’s top domestic security agency, the FSB, accused him of “gathering information about the special military operation” in Ukraine.
The U.S. Embassy in Moscow condemned the sentence and rejected the charges against him as “completely false and unfounded.”
Shonov was charged under a new article of Russian law that criminalizes “cooperation on a confidential basis with a foreign state, international, or foreign organization to assist their activities clearly aimed against Russia’s security.” It carries a prison sentence of up to eight years….