A Texas man who acted as a secret agent for the Russian government and illegally exported cutting-edge military technology to Russia has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Alexander Fishenko learned his punishment Thursday in federal court in New York.
He pleaded guilty in September to crimes including acting as a Russian agent.
The 50-year-old Fishenko is a U.S. and Russian citizen.
He owned Houston-based Arc Electronics Inc.
Prosecutors say he led a scheme that evaded strict export controls for micro-electronics commonly used in missile guidance systems, detonation triggers and radar systems.
Prosecutors say his company shipped about $50 million worth of technologies to Russia between 2002 and 2012.
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He got off light.
Should have been life in prison for jeopardizing all of us American citizens!
We Americans don't take kindly to such things.
Here is why he should get life:
In other Russian-related news, a Russian government-owned news site Sputnik has reported that the Kremlin is building a nuclear space bomber that should be flight-ready by 2020.
The Russian military claims it's making progress on a space plane similar to the U.S. Air Force's secretive X-37B robotic mini-shuttle.
The tech is pretty basic.
But alone among space-plane developers, the Kremlin is proposing to arm its space plane.
With nukes. Lt. Col. Aleksei Solodovnikov, a rocketry instructor at the Russian Strategic Missile Forces Academy in St. Petersburg who is overseeing the space plane's development, said the orbital bomber would be flight-ready by 2020.
It's unclear how much money the Kremlin is investing in the project, and how serious senior officers are about actually deploying the space plane, if and when Solodovnikov and his team finish it.
In any event, the military space plane could give Russia a potentially history-altering nuclear first-strike capability.
"The idea is that the bomber will take off from a normal home airfield to patrol Russian airspace," Solodovnikov said, according to Sputnik, a government-owned news site.
"Upon command, it will ascend into outer space, strike a target with nuclear warheads and then return to its home base."
Thanks to its orbital capability, the bomber would be able to nuke any target on Earth no longer than two hours after taking off, Solodovnikov claimed.
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