Ivan Safronov

Ivan Ivanovich Safronov (Russian: Иван Иванович Сафронов) (16 January 1956 – 2 March 2007) was a Russian journalist and columnist who covered military affairs for the daily newspaper Kommersant. He died after falling from the fifth floor of his Moscow apartment building. His apartment was on the third floor. There are speculations that he may have been killed for his critical reporting: the Taganka District prosecutor's office in Moscow initiated a criminal investigation into Safronov's death, and in September 2007, officially ruled his death a suicide.

His son Ivan Safronov, who has also worked as a high-profile journalist, was arrested in July 2020 on charges of treason. A Kremlin spokesman stated following the arrest that "As far as we know this is not linked to his prior journalistic activity in any way." Kommersant called the charges of treason "absurd".

Safronov was born in 1956 in Moscow. In 1979, he graduated with a major in computer engineering from the Engineering Faculty at the Dzerzhinsky Military Academy. He served as a military engineer in the 15th Command near Ussuriysk in the Russian Far East. In 1983, Safronov was transferred to the Titov Space Center (Главный испытательный центр испытаний и управления космическими средствами) in Krasnoznamensk, a closed town in Moscow Oblast.

In January 1993 he began working in the press-service at the Russian Space Troops. On 2 October 1997, Safronov retired from active duty and was transferred to the army reserve as a lieutenant colonel. In December 1997, he became a military columnist at the newspaper Kommersant in Moscow. In December 2002, Safronov was made a colonel in the army reserve.

Safronov wrote about changes in the defense leadership and problems in military training, as well as about defense technology and military testing failures that often went unacknowledged and unreported by the army.

In December 2006, Safronov wrote about the third consecutive launch failure of the Bulava intercontinental ballistic missile. The military did not acknowledge the failure. There were further allegations that Safronov disclosed classified information in his articles. FSB agents questioned him in 2006 over a story about the Samara-based TsSKB-Progress, the manufacturer of the Soyuz rocket. The agents wanted to know where the columnist had unearthed some sensitive data. Once Safronov showed them the website where he got his facts, the FSB dropped its case.

Safronov returned to Moscow in late February 2007 from a reporting trip to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where he had covered the annual IDEX 2007 arms exhibition's gathering of defense manufacturers. He had stated that he would check information that he had received on possible new deliveries of Russian weapons to the Middle East while at the arms exhibition in the United Arab Emirates. Safronov was interested in a possible sale of Su-30 fighter jets to Syria and S-300V missiles to Iran. He had information that those deals would be concluded through a third party, in order for Moscow to avoid accusations in the West of selling weapons to pariah states.

Prior to his return, Safronov called the editorial office at Kommersant from Abu Dhabi to say that he had found confirmation of the claims. On 27 February he attended a press conference held by the head of the Federal Service of Military and Technical Cooperation Mikhail Dmitriev at ITAR-TASS. There he told colleagues that he had found information that more contracts had been signed between Russia and Syria for the sale of MiG-29 jets and Pantsir-S1 and Iskander-E missiles. He added that he would not write about those deals, however, because he had been warned that doing so would cause an international scandal and the FSB would make charges against him of revealing state secrets stick. He did not say who had warned him.