A Russian-Swede arrested last year in a dramatic dawn raid on his quiet suburban home goes on trial in Stockholm on Monday accused of passing Western technology to Russia’s military.
Sergei Skvortsov, a 60-year-old dual national, has lived in Sweden since the 1990s where he has run import-export companies.
He is to appear in a Stockholm district court charged with carrying out “unlawful intelligence activities” against the United States and Sweden for a decade until his arrest in November 2022. The prosecution believes Skvortsov and his companies provided a platform for “the Russian military intelligence service GRU and part of the Russian state system” to illegally procure Western technology, mainly electronic devices which were off-limits to Moscow due to international sanctions.
Skvortsov faces up to four years in prison if found guilty. In detention since his arrest, he has denied the allegations. Sweden’s charge of “unlawful intelligence activities” is a notch lower than espionage.
“There was a severe risk for national security interests, both in Sweden and the US,” prosecutor Henrik Olin told AFP last week when Skvortsov was formally charged, adding the implications reached even further.
“You only have to look at the battlefield in Ukraine to see that there’s a real need for this from the Russian military industrial complex,” Olin said.
In the indictment, the prosecution accused Skvortsov of gathering “information and the actual acquisition of various items that the Russian state and the defence forces could not acquire on the open market due to export rules and sanctions.” It accused him of “locating the items requested by the Russian state and the armed forces, negotiating and carrying out the purchase and further organising the transport of the goods while concealing the actual end user.”