A Russian court has sentenced a 48-year-old man to 14 years in a maximum-security penal colony after convicting him of high treason for photographing the graves of soldiers, Metro.UK reported. The defendant, identified as Nikolai Shcherbakov, was accused of secretly taking photos and videos at a memorial cemetery in Yaroslavl, a city northeast of Moscow, starting in late 2024. Russian state prosecutors claimed he collected the footage to pass information about military personnel to Ukrainian intelligence services.
“The court established that since October 2024, defendant Nikolai Shcherbakov had systematically visited a memorial cemetery, where he secretly photographed and recorded video of the burial sites of military personnel,” the court where he was convicted said on its website.
“The Yaroslavl resident sent the collected information via a messenger service to representatives of the Ukrainian intelligence services.”
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According to the report, a Russian regional court released footage, which claimed that a probe into Shcherbakov’s crimes began late last year. The case was officially sent to trial this year in July.
This is not the first such case to be reported. Earlier this June, a woman was detained for taking pictures of Russian military graves in Sverdlovsk Oblast. Apart from this, a woman was jailed for the same reason in Yekaterinburg in June.
News outlet Caliber reported that these cases prompted the Federal Security Service (FSB) to increase surveillance of cemeteries in the region.
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US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he had a “great” conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier in the week. Trump claimed that the Russian leader wanted to make a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
“He is wanting to make a deal, and if (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskiy is wanting to make a deal, that’d be very nice,” Trump told reporters.
Trump spoke over the phone with Putin on Tuesday, shortly after US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, returned from a diplomatic swing through Moscow and Kyiv. The duo, who are in charge of most major peace negotiations for the US, discussed potential proposals to bring the war to a close.
