A 30-year-old Russian man charged with espionage for allegedly passing information about a European rocket to Russian intelligence went on trial in Germany on February 17.
The defendant, identified only as Ilnur N. in line with German privacy rules, worked as a research assistant for a science and technology professor at the University of Augsburg.
At the opening of the trial in Munich, Ilnur N. rejected the allegations against him and told the court he was “not an agent.”
Prosecutors say Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) contacted the man in November 2019 or earlier and that he agreed to do work for the agency.
The SVR was interested in the various development stages of the European Ariane launcher and the research that the accused man was conducting, the federal prosecutor's office said in the indictment.
The Russian met regularly with a Germany-based handler and passed on information about aerospace research products related to the Ariane launcher, prosecutors said. He allegedly received a total of 2,500 euros ($2,839) in cash.
According to the indictment, the man handed over scientific articles to a Russian consulate employee on several occasions. Some of the articles were publicly accessible online. But others were not, and he allegedly used his university access point to retrieve them and load them onto USB sticks, dpa reported.
He was arrested in June in the Bavarian city of Augsburg as he handed over USB sticks to his Russian contact, prosecutors said.
The defendant did not deny that he passed on information to an employee of the Russian consulate, whom he said he had met by chance.
“I never thought about him being an employee of an agent organization,” he said in court.
"No one asked me if I would like to work for a secret organization," he told the court. "If someone had asked, I would have said no immediately."
The defendant also said he could not imagine that Russian intelligence would be interested in information that was already publicly available.
Last month, German media reported that a consulate staff member was allegedly an agent for Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency and had been declared persona non grata in Germany last summer and told to leave the country.