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A court in St. Petersburg has placed medical scholar Alexei Dudarev in pretrial detention. According to the human rights project Pervyi Otdel, Dudarev is facing charges of “state treason” over academic papers that “could have been read by Norwegian intelligence.”
Dudarev is a chief research fellow at the North-Western Scientific Center for Hygiene and Public Health of the Russian consumer rights regulator Rospotrebnadzor. He was detained on Jan. 14 on his way to work. The court remanded Dudarev in custody until March 13 of this year.
Over the past few years, Dudarev had been engaged exclusively in academic work, as his son told human rights defenders. He wrote articles for Russian and international scientific journals, took part in conferences, and studied public health issues affecting indigenous peoples of the North. The scientist’s relatives say he has never held a security clearance and has never signed on to any nondisclosure obligations.
According to Pervyi Otdel, the case against the scientist is based on his co-authored publications for international scientific journals connected with the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP). Some of the papers from these journals are publicly available. The AMAP programme operates under the auspices of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum that includes Russia among its members. According to investigators, information from Dudarev’s scientific articles could allegedly have been used by Norwegian intelligence. According to estimates from human rights defenders, in 2025 Russia handed down a record number of sentences under espionage and state treason charges. A total of 468 people were convicted on accusations of espionage, state treason, confidential cooperation with foreign organizations, and providing assistance to the country’s enemies. By the end of the year, 31 scientists were in custody, seven of whom had been arrested in 2025.