Golubkin Valery Nikolaevich

Golubkin Valery Nikolaevich

Biography

2023: Sentence - 12 years in prison for treason

On June 26, 2023, the Moscow City Court sentenced Valery Golubkin, Doctor of Technical Sciences, to imprisonment for treason for a period of 12 years with serving a sentence in a maximum security colony. A 71-year-old professor at MIPT, a leading researcher at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute, pleaded not guilty.

According to Kommersant, citing lawyer Valery Golubkin Ivan Pavlov (recognized as a foreign agent), in November 2018, at the direction of the chief, the scientist handed over reports on the work done to the HEXAFLY-INT project coordinator Johan Stilant (ESA-ESTEC). According to the lawyer, Valery Golubkin did not collect information for reports, but only helped to draw them up. According to the lawyer, documents confirming the lack of "sensitive" information were obtained for all reports.

Valery Golubkin was engaged in hypersonic streamlining of aircraft elements, optimization of aerodynamic forms and genetic optimization algorithms. The professor also turned out to be a colleague of physicist Anatoly Gubanov accused of treason. Gubanov and Golubkin were co-authors of a scientific paper on supersonic speeds.

The project of a hypersonic hydrogen-fueled aircraft HEXAFLY-INT started in 2014 and ended in 2019. The task of scientists from TsAGI was to conduct "design studies, a ground experiment and make a prototype for flight tests," the website of the Ministry of Industry and Trade said.

Materials on participation in HEXAFLY-INT were published on the institute's website; articles on experiments within the framework of the project, including those authored by Valery Golubkin, were published in the institute's journal. The research was attended by four Russian scientific organizations, several European and Australian, as well as Airbus Corporation, followed from the messages of the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the European Commission. The project budget was €11.5 million, of which slightly less than half was provided by the European Union.^[1]

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