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Russia Charges Jailed US Citizen with Espionage

The sun rises over new buildings under construction with the Stalin's style skyscraper on the right in Moscow, Russia, early Friday, Aug. 18, 2023. (AP)
The sun rises over new buildings under construction with the Stalin's style skyscraper on the right in Moscow, Russia, early Friday, Aug. 18, 2023. (AP)
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Russia Charges Jailed US Citizen with Espionage

The sun rises over new buildings under construction with the Stalin's style skyscraper on the right in Moscow, Russia, early Friday, Aug. 18, 2023. (AP)
The sun rises over new buildings under construction with the Stalin's style skyscraper on the right in Moscow, Russia, early Friday, Aug. 18, 2023. (AP)

Russia has charged a jailed American citizen with espionage, state news agencies reported, upping the pressure on US President Joe Biden's administration which has been trying to find a way to bring several detained citizens back home from Russia.

Russia's RIA and TASS news agencies said that Moscow's Lefortovo court had remanded Gene Spector in pre-trial custody on suspicion of espionage, which is punishable with a jail term of 10 to 20 years.

"The court granted the request of the investigation to detain a US citizen Spector on charges under Article 276 (espionage) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation," TASS quoted an unidentified source at the court as saying.

The news agencies did not report any details of the new charges, but said the court session was held behind closed doors as the case materials were classified.

Spector is already serving a 3-1/2-year sentence after pleading guilty to his role in bribing an assistant of ex-Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, according to the news agencies.

Spector was born in what is now St. Petersburg and then moved to the United States. Before his 2021 arrest, he served as chairman of the board of Medpolymerprom Group, a company specializing in cancer-curing drugs, TASS said.

Speaking on CNN, White House spokesperson John Kirby said the administration was still collecting information about the case and had no comment yet.

A State Department spokesperson said they were aware of reports of charges against a US citizen in Russia and were monitoring the situation, but declined to comment further.

The United States has been talking to Russia about ways to bring back several American citizens detained in Moscow, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan.

The Kremlin has confirmed that it has held some discussions with Washington but has repeatedly said swaps can only be considered after trials and has cautioned that US attempts to speak publicly about the talks will undermine efforts.

Russia's ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, said on Wednesday that Moscow and Washington operate an effective channel to swap prisoners.

The Journal's Gershkovich was arrested in March on espionage charges that he, the Journal and Washington deny. Russia says he was caught red handed.

Former US Marine Whelan is serving a 16-year sentence in a Russian penal colony after being convicted of espionage charges that Washington also says are a sham. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke by phone to Whelan this month.

Last December, US basketball star Brittney Griner was released in a prisoner swap, having been sentenced to nine years in a penal colony for possessing vape cartridges containing cannabis oil - which is banned in Russia - after a judicial process labelled a sham by Washington.

Since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022, the United States has repeatedly told its citizens to leave Russia due to the risk of arbitrary arrest or harassment by Russian law enforcement agencies.

In June, Michael Travis Leake, a US musician and former paratrooper, was shown in court, locked in a metal cage. He was arrested on drug dealing charges. Reuters was unable to reach him for comment.

Brazil this year refused a US request to extradite Sergey Cherkasov, who Western intelligence agencies say is a Russian spy who tried to use a false identity to infiltrate the International Criminal Court (ICC).

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Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
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Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front party who tapped into blue-collar anger over immigration and globalisation and revelled in minimising the Holocaust, died on Tuesday aged 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen's political party, National Rally (Rassemblement National).
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting - as a soldier in France's colonial wars, as a founder in 1972 of the National Front, for which he contested five presidential elections, or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife, often conducted publicly.

Controversy was Le Pen's constant companion: his multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred and condoning war crimes dogged the National Front, according to Reuters.
His declaration that the Nazi gas chambers were "merely a detail" of World War Two history and that the Nazi occupation of France was "not especially inhumane" were for many people repulsive.
"If you take a book of a thousand pages on World War Two, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail," Le Pen said in the late 1990s, doubling down on earlier remarks.
Those comments provoked outrage, including in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Commenting on Le Pen's death, President Emmanuel Macron said: "A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge."
Le Pen helped reset the parameters of French politics in a career spanning 40 years that, harnessing discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways heralded Donald Trump's rise to the White House.
He reached a presidential election run-off in 2002 but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chirac. Voters backed a mainstream conservative rather than bring the far right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s.
Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he saw as a supranational project usurping the powers of nation states, tapping the kind of resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU.
Marine Le Pen learned of her father's death during a layover in Kenya as she returned from the French overseas territory of Mayotte.
Born in Brittany in 1928, Jean-Marie Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and had a reputation for rarely spending a night out on the town without a brawl. He joined the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.
Le Pen campaigned to keep Algeria French, as an elected member of France's parliament and a soldier in the then French-run territory. He publicly justified the use of torture but denied using such practices himself.
After years on the periphery of French politics, his fortunes changed in 1977 when a millionaire backer bequeathed him a mansion outside Paris and 30 million francs, around 5 million euros ($5.2 million) in today's money.
The helped Le Pen further his political ambitions, despite being shunned by traditional parties.
"Lots of enemies, few friends and honor aplenty," he told a website linked to the far-right. He wrote in his memoir: "No regrets."
In 2011, Le Pen was succeeded as party chief by daughter Marine, who campaigned to shed the party's enduring image as antisemitic and rebrand it as a defender of the working class.
She has reached - and lost - two presidential election run-offs. Opinion polls make her the frontrunner in the next presidential election, due in 2027.
The rebranding did not sit well with her father, whose inflammatory statements and sniping forced her to expel him from the party.
Jean-Marie Le Pen described as a "betrayal" his daughter's decision to change the party's name in 2018 to National Rally, and said she should marry to lose her family name.
Their relationship remained difficult but he had warm words for her when Macron defeated her in 2022: "She did all she could, she did very well."