Moscow's Lefortovo District Court in April ordered the pretrial detention of Chen Yong Ta, a 42-year-old Chinese doctoral student at RUDN University, on espionage charges, Mediazona reported. The hearing took place in April.
Before the criminal case was opened, on March 30, the Dorogomilovsky District Court arrested Chen Yong Ta for 15 days on an administrative charge of petty hooliganism, allegedly for using profanity in a public place. Immediately after the administrative arrest, the Chinese citizen was transferred to a pretrial detention center under the criminal case.
The substance of the charges is unknown; Russian authorities typically do not disclose details of such cases. Article 276 of the Russian Criminal Code on espionage applies to foreign citizens and carries a sentence of 10 to 20 years in prison.
Chen Yong Ta studied at the Department of Comparative Political Science at RUDN and focused on China's foreign policy. In 2024–2025, he published several academic works in Russia on China's 'soft' and 'hard' power, as well as on China's relations with Southeast Asian countries. In 2025, the doctoral student participated in the 'Lomonosov' conference with a presentation titled 'China's Role in the BRICS Mechanism'.
Since the start of the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war, the practice of applying 'espionage' articles has changed: such criminal cases have become one of the most common forms of political persecution, noted the human rights organization First Department. According to calculations by T-Invariant and the CISRUS center from December 2025, since 2022, 115 scientists, teachers, students, and other members of the academic community have faced persecution, with 34 people held in pretrial detention or colonies.