A Russian scientist freed on Saturday after nearly a decade in jail for selling secrets to China accused Vladimir Putin’s “court” of turning the Kremlin leader into a tsar and of using the legal system to punish opponents.
Valentin Danilov, 66, looked pale and thin as he was released on parole from a prison colony on the edge of the industrial Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk after serving eight years of a 14-year sentence.
But he was defiant over a case which human rights activists say was politically motivated and part of an attempt by Putin to intimidate academics with ties to other countries during his first term as president.
“I would really appreciate it if somebody finally told me what state secret I sold,” Danilov told reporters after he emerged from the prison colony’s high corrugated walls and travelled by car through the snow-dusted streets of Krasnoyarsk to his daughter’s apartment.
He declined to comment directly on President Putin but criticized Russia’s political and judicial system nearly 13 years after the former KGB spy first rose to power and more than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“As for President Putin, I guess everybody would be the same as him in his place. The court makes the tsar. In many cases it’s the people around him that are guilty rather than him himself,” said Danilov.
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