25 February: After a secret trial, a Russian military court has found FSB Colonel Sergei Mikhailov and Kaspersky Lab senior executive Ruslan Stoyanov guilty of treason.
The allegation was that they had conspired to pass information to the FBI. Mikhailov had been deputy head of the FSB’s cyber security division. He was sentenced 22 years in prison. Stoyanov was sentenced to 14 years.
The pair had been arrested in December 2016. Mikhailov was famously hooded and dragged from a high level FSB meeting by masked special forces commandos – all under the glare of television cameras to highlight his humiliation. Because the court proceedings were secret, it is not known whether there was any meaningful evidence against the men or whether they have fallen foul of yet another internal Russian power struggle.