"I think the first reaction of Konstantin Lvovich to the verdict was emotional, it was also connected with secrecy of the case, and with the fact that by the day of the verdict announcement he had been staying in the remand prison where he was in touch only with investigators, employees of the remand prison, and with lawyers, and probably due to possible despair of impossibility to prove his innocence. In my opinion, in any case the appeal must be filed, because this way he will win time before being transferred to the prison in Zhitikara. Probably something will have changed in this period of time," said Zhovtis.
Answering the question about possible parallels between the case of Syroyezhkin and Edward Snowden, ex agent of the US national security committee, he said "there are no analogues at all".
"As distinct from Syroyezhkin, Snowden really disclosed the information related to state secrets, and he owned these data and distributed them on the basis of his belief that the American society should know about it," he said.
In the case of Syroyezhkin, the speaker noted, "we are talking about some kind of analytical work made to order, which is done by any scientific researcher or an analyst commissioned by various scientific journals, research centers and so on".
“Syroyezhkin does not know any state secrets, although he may have had access to restricted data. Often, when a researcher of this level does analytical work based even on data from open sources, he inevitably draws conclusions based on all his knowledge," he said.
Photo source: picture from an open source