The Central District Military Court of Yekaterinburg, Russia has sentenced Russian officer Evgeny Alakaev to 18 years in prison, Memopzk reports.

He was found guilty of high treason and illegally obtaining information containing state secrets.

The first five years of the sentence will be served in prison, and the rest in a strict regime correctional colony.

According to the prosecution, on September 21, 2023, Alakaev entered the office of the duty officer of the military-political labor control point and saw a document entitled “Circumstances of the Incident” on the table.

The document was about the death of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh on September 20, 2023.

Evgeny Alakaev had previously wanted to go to Nagorno-Karabakh as a Russian peacekeeper, but his close friend and colleague, Colonel Tagir-Murod Karayev, was sent there. And on September 20, he was killed along with other Russian servicemen.

Evgeny Alakaev already knew about what had happened and was extremely shocked by it. Alakaev took the document, read it, and took a photo of its first page with his smartphone. Later, he sent the photo of this document to his mother, Lyubov Alakaeva.

According to the investigation, the document was classified as top secret, as evidenced by the corresponding inscription-stamp in the upper right corner of the document.

The document was classified because it contained information about “losses during special operations in peacetime.”

But according to Evgeny Alakaev, there was no inscription on the document, and he was not aware of its secret content. He simply sent its photo to his mother to share his feelings about the death of a close friend. Alakaev is convinced that he “could have found himself in their situation.”

At the same time, before Alakaev got acquainted with the secret document, information was disseminated in the media about the circumstances of the death of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh and the personal data of one of the deceased, which experts classified as a state secret.

It also seems suspicious that the information already disseminated in the media about the losses among Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh could harm the security of Russia, Memopzk adds.