Roving Periscope: Amid Ukraine losses, Russia arrests missile scientist for ‘betraying secrets’ to China

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: On February 4, 2022, when Vladimir Putin inked a “limitless friendship” with Xi Jinping in Beijing, barely 20 days before invading Ukraine, little did the Russian President, perhaps, know that China was allegedly stealing state-of-the-art missile technology from Russia.

Now, Russia has arrested a hypersonic scientist accusing him of ‘betraying secrets’ to China, the media reported on Thursday.

Alexander Shiplyuk, Director of Siberia’s Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, along with two other hypersonic missile technologists, was arrested for alleged treason, the reports said.

They have been accused of handing over classified material at a scientific conference in China in 2017.

Shiplyuk, 56, however, pleaded innocence and insisted the information in question was not classified and was freely available online.

“He is convinced of the fact that the information was not secret, and of his own innocence,” the report said.

Meanwhile, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who heads the Wagner Group, the pro-Putin Russian private paramilitary force, said on Thursday he had lost over 20,000 fighters in the drawn-out battle for Bakhmut, with about 20 percent of the 50,000 Russian convicts he recruited to fight in the 15-month war, dying in the eastern Ukrainian city.

This was in stark contrast with Moscow’s claims that Russia had lost just over 6,000 troops in the Ukraine war so far. Also, the Wagner figure of lost troops in Ukraine is higher than the official estimate of the Soviet losses in the Afghanistan war of 15,000 Russian deaths between 1979 and 1989.

Prigozhin also said his soldiers had started withdrawing from Ukraine’s eastern town of Bakhmut, which they captured on Saturday last, as he claimed they fought some of the fiercest battles since the Second World War.

These battles may have left around 20,000 Wagner soldiers dead or wounded as well as many thousand regular Russian troops.

Prigozhin said regular Russian troops would replace his fighters as they pull out of the town.

“We are withdrawing the units from Bakhmut. From today at five in the morning, May 25 until June 1, most of the units will rebase to camps in the rear. We are handing our positions to the military,” he said.

The Wagner boss has repeatedly criticized Russia’s military top brass and said his forces would return to Bakhmut if the regular army was unable to manage the situation.

Ukrainian military chiefs ordered the defense of Bakhmut for months, even though it had no strategic importance, but they have succeeded in tying down Wagner and Russian units in the clashes ahead of a planned counter-offensive, the media reported.

Russian army units in Ukraine are said to be so exhausted that they will have to struggle harder to counter-punch if the formidable defenses they have built up in eastern Ukraine are breached.

Ukraine said on Thursday it had shot down all 36 Iranian-made drones launched by Russia in overnight attacks which it said probably targeted critical infrastructure and military facilities.

Since October 2022, Russia, which launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, calling it a “special military operation,” has regularly sent waves of drones to attack targets in Ukraine. Although they are slow, drones are cheaper and more expendable than advanced missiles.

“The enemy likely aimed to attack critical infrastructure and military facilities in the western regions of the state,” the Ukrainian air force said on Telegram.