Russian physicist Oskar Kaibyshev was given a six-year suspended prison sentence last week for exporting technologies with possible military use to South Korea. Human-rights advocates say the accusation is baseless and part of a series of prosecutions unjustly targeting Russian scientists.

Kaibyshev, the suspended director of the Institute for Metals Superplasticity Problems in Ufa, was also fined about US$130,000 and banned from resuming his directorship for three years. Reports say he intends to appeal against the verdict.

In 2002, Kaibyshev's institute sent samples of aluminium alloys and a titanium product to a tyre company in Seoul, South Korea. The materials allow better high-pressure tyres to be made, but the prosecution said they could also be used in manufacturing missiles.

Agents of the Russian Federal Security Service first arrested Kaibyshev in March 2003 after seizing documents from a South Korean business delegation, including representatives from the tyre company and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, at the airport in Ufa. He was arrested again in February 2005.

Kaibyshev's supporters say the information he provided was public knowledge. “Every country has the right to defend its state secrets, but Kaibyshev's defence has clearly proved that all information he passed on was previously published in books and journals,” says Eugene Chudnovsky, a condensed-matter physicist at the City University of New York who chairs the human-rights division of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Oskar Kaibyshev (centre) and his lawyers: other scientists have received much harsher sentences. Credit: A. VALIEV/KOMMERSANT

Over the past decade, Russian courts have given lengthy prison sentences to a number of scientists convicted of spying. Prominent examples include physicist Valentin Danilov and military analyst Igor Sutyagin, who were sentenced to 14 and 15 years, respectively, in 2004. Several other Russian scientists are also being held in custody for alleged espionage and high treason, and there may be more unpublicized cases, says Chudnovsky.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, science in Russia has suffered financially. Foreign grants and collaborations have helped keep many institutes alive. But accusations against scientists who work with foreign groups or companies have also become widespread.

The threat of prosecution is making things tense for Russian scientists who maintain international contacts and aim to commercialize their research, says Sarah Olmstead of the human-rights programme at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Prosecutors in Kaibyshev's case had called for an unsuspended six-year sentence. The relatively mild verdict could be due, some say, to international outrage over the case.

“It's a big relief to us all, but one case doesn't make a statistic,” says Chudnovsky. “I'm still waiting for an imprisoned scientist to be released before I can believe that things are getting better.”