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In from the cold

By Jon Copley

15 April 2000

With the Cold War over, Sergey Piontkovsky thought nothing of picking up the phone or sending e-mails to Western colleagues from his office in Sevastopol, Ukraine. Just a routine job for a marine biologist working on projects with scientists overseas. But Ukraine’s security service had other ideas. This latter-day KGB decided Piontkovsky’s chats amounted to the leaking of state secrets. Raids were ordered on his home and offices at the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas. He was interrogated and banned from leaving the country. Thanks to a massive campaign involving scientists around the world, charges were never…

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