Russian Suspects Deny U.S. Charge in Smuggling Scandal

Russian suspects in a U.S. probe into alleged smuggling of high-tech military technology to Russia denied wrongdoing as a senior official accused Washington of reluctance to share expertise.

While Russia's authorities denied any links to an alleged military exports ring, some saw the case as a political time bomb similar in scope to the 2010 spy-swap which involved ten agents including the sultry redhead Anna Chapman.

"All of the charges against me are unlawful, I didn't do anything illegal," said Sergei Klinov, who heads a Moscow-based company called Apex and faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice by U.S. courts.

"I only found out about the crimes that our firm is supposedly involved in from morning papers," Klinov, 44, told the pro-government Izvestia newspaper.

"We are trying to understand what is happening."

Klinov is one of 11 people U.S. prosecutors have accused of participating in a Texas-based ring led by an unregistered agent of the Russian government, and smuggling state-of-the-art technology to sell to Russia's security agencies and the military.

U.S. officials arrested eight people earlier this week while the other three, including Klinov, are in Russia, out of reach of U.S. law enforcement, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor's office for Brooklyn, New York, said.

Four Russian citizens in the probe pleaded not guilty in a U.S. court on Thursday, their lawyer Aleksei Tarasov told the state RIA-Novosti agency in New York.

The U.S. prosecutors have said that Apex is a certified supplier of the Russian military that procured microelectronics without necessary export documents, disguising them as civilian items.

The Apex website lists aerospace, transportation, and medicine as its main spheres of expertise, and describes the company as a distributor of electronic components.

In connection with the probe, the U.S. government has now put the firm on a blacklist of 165 entities as acting against U.S. national security and therefore facing restrictions and special licensing requirements for certain exports.

One of Russia's highest-ranking officials reacted with indignation to the move Friday, denying that any Russian defence companies dealt with the listed firms or people and accusing Americans of being stingy with their technology.

"Thanks to the Americans, the latest scandal is a slap in the face to the people who think that help can come from abroad," said Dmitry Rogozin, a deputy prime minister in charge of the defence industry.

Rogozin, who is known for his hawkish remarks, suggested that no foreign country was willing to help Russia obtain modern technologies.

"We have so many 'friends' in the world it's impossible to count them all," the Interfax news agency quoted Rogozin as saying.

Even if the people now held in U.S. custody are not spies, the effects of the latest scandal might end up being nearly as damaging as the consequences of the embarrassing expulsion of 10 Russian sleeper agents in 2010.

"There will be massive political fallout", because, unlike the sleeper spies, many of the subjects of the current probe are U.S. citizens who will be tried in a U.S. court, said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia's security agencies and editor of agentura.ru website.

"This will produce a lot of details, and the scandal will have lasting consequences. It will become clear what technology they delivered and how, and what U.S. technology Russia was interested in."