MOSCOW — The treason trial of some of Russia’s top cybersecurity officials ended on Tuesday without solving the mysteries at the center of the case: Why had the men been arrested and what, if anything, did they have to do with Russia’s efforts to disrupt the 2016 American presidential election? Was the prosecution driven not by geopolitical concerns but by a businessman’s desire for revenge?

The case began when Russian counterintelligence investigators seized several leading cybersecurity officials in raids conducted in early December 2016. With the arrests coming one month after the American election, speculation swirled that the men had been caught leaking information that helped the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russia’s election hacking.

But no clear evidence of that has ever emerged, and the drawn-out trial wrapped up in a Moscow military courtroom without shedding any official light on the reasons for the arrests or if the timing of them, coming so close to the election, signaled a connection to the Russian meddling.

Under the watchful eye of security forces wearing ski masks, journalists were allowed into the courtroom for the first time on Tuesday to hear the verdict. Speaking for about 10 minutes, a judge convicted the two main figures and sentenced them to lengthy terms in prison for treason, without saying why.

Sergei Mikhailov, a former deputy director of the computer crimes unit of the Federal Security Service, the main successor agency to the K.G.B., was sentenced to 22 years in a penal colony on two counts of treason.

Ruslan Stoyanov, a senior researcher at Kaspersky Lab, an antivirus company, was sentenced to 14 years on one count of treason. Two other suspects had earlier pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.

Both men convicted Tuesday had for years cooperated with United States law enforcement and Western computer security researchers on bread-and-butter cybercrime issues like stopping spam and bank fraud.

But then came the election hacking scandal in 2016, and the men’s arrests signaled that this type of cooperation would stop.

Cooperating with the United States was “something that went out of fashion after the scandal,” said Andrei Soldatov, the author of “The Red Web,” and an authority on Russian internet policies.

As part of the election interference operation, two Russian hacking groups intruded into the servers of the Democratic National Committee. One group was affiliated with the F.S.B., Mr. Mikhailov’s agency, and the other with the Russian military intelligence organization known as the G.R.U., according to United States government officials and cybersecurity researchers who studied the breach.

Only the G.R.U. leaked the stolen information, according to a United States interagency report on the hacking released in 2017. The special counsel investigating Russian meddling, Robert S. Mueller III, last year indicted 12 G.R.U. officers.

The detailed accusations by American intelligence agencies against Russia, and the stated high level of confidence in their findings, gave rise to questions about whether they had sources inside Russia.

Leaks about the treason case reported in the Russian news media, as well as interviews with defense lawyers and a witness, have indicated that the defendants’ ties to American officials long predated the presidential campaign, and that the information they passed on was not directly related to the hacking investigation.

Kommersant, a Russian newspaper, reported this month that Mr. Mikhailov and Mr. Stoyanov were accused of revealing to the F.B.I. information about F.S.B. investigative methods while cooperating with American colleagues on a criminal case nearly a decade ago.

Mr. Mikhailov, through intermediaries, passed the data to the F.B.I. in 2011 while investigating ChronoPay, a Russian online payments processing company, the newspaper report said, potentially opening a window on money flows in the Russian online underworld — information that could also be useful in the investigation of the election hacking.

At the time, Russia was under diplomatic pressure from the United States and Canada to prosecute the company’s owner, Pavel Vrublevsky, for selling counterfeit erectile dysfunction pills to Americans through websites. Mr. Vrublevsky has denied ties to that scheme.

Mr. Mikhailov led the successful prosecution of Mr. Vrublevsky on a separate accusation of hacking the payment system for online ticket sales at Aeroflot, the Russian national airline.

Outside the courtroom on Tuesday, a defense lawyer, Inga Lebedeva, told reporters that Mr. Vrublevsky had initiated the treason case in a vendetta against the F.S.B. official and the cybercrime researcher who had put him in prison in the Aeroflot case.

“His goal was revenge,” Ms. Lebedeva said. At no point during the closed trial, she said, had Russian meddling in the 2016 United States election come up.

“The boys think that in their activities against hackers and criminals they stepped on somebody’s tail,” Ms. Lebedeva said of the two defendants. She said both men would appeal their convictions.

Mr. Vrublevsky, in an interview, said he had testified against the pair in the treason trial and believed that they had indeed illegally passed information to the American authorities, but not about election hacking. “These guys were selling fairy tales to the United States about people doing business, like me,” he said.

Still, the arrests amounted to a purge of the leadership of the cyberwing of Russia’s main intelligence agency in the midst of the electoral hacking scandal, an issue carrying immense implications for Russia’s relations with the United States.

Along with Mr. Mikhailov, who was reportedly dragged from an F.S.B. meeting with a bag over his head, Russian counterintelligence officers detained his deputy, Dmitry A. Dokuchaev. Mr. Dokuchaev pleaded guilty in the treason case.

The United States has not accused Mr. Dokuchaev of having any role in the election hacking but has indicted him in a separate cybercrime case that overlaps with sanctions imposed on Russians for election meddling. Federal authorities in Washington and San Francisco in 2017 accused Mr. Dokuchaev, who at the time was also facing the treason charge in Russia, of doubling as a cybercriminal while working at the F.S.B. He was accused of hacking Yahoo and stealing 500 million passwords.

That indictment identified him as having overseen the work of one of three others named in the Yahoo hack, a suspected cybercriminal, Aleksei A. Belan, whom the Obama administration placed under sanctions in relation to the election hacking.

Source: Read Full Article