Not sure what to make of this yet, but according to Reuters the Russian Supreme Court just annulled the treason conviction for Valery Golubkin, a Russian physicist in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Aerohydromechanics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology for supposedly passing on information about high-speed experimental flying vehicles to a ‘foreign power.’ The foreign power in this case was the European Space Agency, and the subject was the HEXAFLY project, an international project aimed at developing a new high-speed civil transportation aircraft.
Putin apparently thought he was passing on secrets related to Russia’s hypersonic missile tech, but Golubkin’s defense at his trial last year was that he was simply passing on info as directed by his boss at the time, Anatoly Gubanov — not that that should have made a difference, since Gubanov was also sentenced to 12 years in prison for treason at the same time:
Russia's TASS state news agency quoted the Supreme Court as saying it had considered a complaint by Golubkin's defence and decided to send the case for a new hearing. No other reason was given.
So Golubkin isn’t exactly home free yet, since it sounds like he could be retried for treason or perhaps some lesser charge, and no word about the ‘treason’ case against his boss. OTOH, when has the Russian Supreme Court ever thrown out a treason charge on anyone during Putin’s long reign?