A cabinet employee of the Ministers of Ukraine was convicted of espionage in favor of Russia. According to the Ukrainian media, Vasily Meheda, a resident of the Kyiv region, who worked in the secretariat of the Ukrainian government and arrested in early April, was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
It is reported that he worked for Russian special services for fifteen years.
As noted in the investigation materials, in recent years, Meched held in the Cabinet of Ministers the position of senior referent of the Analysis department of correspondence and monitoring, and therefore since January 2001 had access to state secrets, which was canceled on June 24, 2010.
In 2006, Vasily Mehedu, at the request of his colleague, also working in the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, first made copies of confidential documents. Each time, he received from $ 800 to $ 3.000 for completing such tasks. And a year later, along with his colleague, Mehed flew to Moscow, where the FSB officers offered them cooperation on an ongoing basis, to which both Ukrainians agreed.
Over the next three years, Vasily Mehed copied and sent secret information from the Cabinet of Ministers, which interested the Russian special services. From 2010 to 2015, this cooperation was interrupted, but then it resumed.
A employee of the Ukrainian government apparatus received a special device from the FSB and memory card for photographing secret documents, as well as a phone with special programs for confidential communication.
Periodically Meched went to Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Cyprus, where he received money from the FSB in exchange for photographs.
“He fully pleaded guilty and collaborated with the investigation,” said BBC to the BBC lawyer, Victor Ovsyannikov.
The court considered Vasily Mehda’s sincere recognition as a softening circumstance, and reduced the term of maximum punishment under the article from fifteen to twelve years of imprisonment.