A former employee of the Federal Security Service (FSB) has been sentenced to six years in prison on high-treason charges in a case linked to a major scandal at Russia's main security agency.
The Moscow Regional Military Court on April 10 also ruled to strip Dmitry Dokuchayev, a former employee of the FSB's cyberunit, of his military rank of major.
Dokuchayev's sentencing is the latest development in a case that shed light on the murky overlap between computer hackers and the FSB.
On April 1, the Moscow City Court sentenced Internet businessman Georgy Fomchenkov to seven years in prison on the same charge in connection with an investigation into the FSB's Center for Information Security.
A senior officer at the center, Colonel Sergei Mikhailov, was sentenced in February to 22 years in prison after a military tribunal found him guilty of treason.
Ruslan Stoyanov, who previously worked for Russia's Interior Ministry and the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, received a 14-year sentence.
Dokuchayev was one of Mikhailov's deputies at the center.
Prosecutors accused Mikhailov and Stoyanov of passing classified information to U.S. and Western intelligence about Pavel Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman and convicted hacker known for running one of the world's biggest spamming operations.
Russian press reports, citing unnamed officials, have alleged that Mikhailov was paid $10 million for information he handed over to foreign intelligence services.
Dokuchayev was also named in a 2017 U.S. Justice Department indictment related to the hacking of hundreds of millions of Yahoo e-mail accounts.
Mikhailov was not named in those charges, though his role was identifiable from the details in the indictment.
