A new state treason case has been opened against Yevgeny Rozhikhin, a former senior researcher at the Physics and Power Engineering Institute (FEI) in Obninsk who was already convicted in 2025 for illegally transferring export-controlled data to a US national laboratory. The case file was submitted to the Kaluga Regional Court on August 25 and appeared on the court's website; what exactly the scientist is accused of is not known.
In September 2025, Rozhikhin was sentenced to four years in a general-regime penal colony under Article 189, Part 3 of the Russian Criminal Code, which covers illegal export or transfer of goods and technologies subject to export control.
According to the Federal Security Service (FSB), the scientist passed scientific and technical information obtained during the execution of an international contract to an employee of a US national laboratory. The information contained data on the characteristics of a power installation that could have been used in the creation of weapons of mass destruction, the agency claimed. Export control had been established over this information, the FSB said.
Rozhikhin was a co-author of research on fast-neutron reactors, a type of reactor that FEI has used since Soviet times. In 2019, he was selected for the position of a specialist in organizing calculations on supercomputers at Laboratory No. 11 of the nuclear energy department.