Developer of Putin’s hypersonic missiles arrested on charges of treason
Director of the Novosibirsk Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITPM) Alexander Shiplyuk was arrested in Russia on charges of treason. Search warrants were executed in the institute before his arrest.
According to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, the scientist’s arrest may be associated with the transfer abroad of information about hypersonic weapons. He is an expert of the scientific and technical council of the military-industrial commission under the government of the Russian Federation, heads the laboratory No. 5 Hypersonic technologies.
The search warrants and arrest are believed to be linked to the case of the chief researcher of the Institute Anatoly Maslov, who was detained on June 27 on suspicion of transferring data about hypersonic research to China. The case is being investigated by the central office of the Russian FSB.
On March 1, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had developed a hypersonic missile named Zircon. In December 2021, Putin announced that these weapons were flawlessly tested. According to Putin, no one else in the world had such weapons. In 2022, Zircon missiles started to be delivered to the Russian army.
This is the third case of the arrest of a scientist in Novosibirsk over the past two months. On June 30, a 54-year-old head of the laboratory of quantum optical technologies of Novosibirsk State University, a researcher at the Institute of Laser Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dmitry Kolker, was detained in the local private clinic Avicenna. The scientist was terminally ill. He was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Kolker died two days after his arrest.