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Plesetsk missile spy sentenced

Rocket launch at Plesetsk (mil.ru)

Got 13-year prison term for selling top-secret data to CIA.

Location

Former chief test engineer, Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Nesterets worked at the Plesetsk cosmodrome in Arkhangelsk Oblast. Russia’s FSB security service says in a statement that Nesterests has admitted selling top secret data about intercontinental ballistic missiles to the United States.

Plesetsk space centre is used both for launching space rockets and test-shooting military intercontinental missiles. 

His guilt of treason was proven by a closed military court and the term of 13-years will take place in a high security prison.

BBC is quoting an interview by RIA Novosti with Nesterests wife where she says her husband wrote a note contradicting the spy charges and sentence.

“He wrote to me and said he had never done anything shameful, that he had not sold out his motherland,” Irina Nesterets said by telephone.”

“I believe him and everyone who knows him believes him and I don’t know why he confessed to doing it.”