An Italian court has approved the extradition to the United States of a Russian entrepreneur accused of smuggling U.S. technologies to Russian arms manufacturers, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported Tuesday.
Artyom Uss, 40, the son of a Siberian governor, was arrested at Milan’s Malpensa Airport on Oct. 17, 2022.
He was one of five Russian citizens arrested by Italian law enforcement at Washington’s request for “unlawful schemes to export powerful” U.S. military technology to Russia.
Some of these technologies were “found in Russian weapons platforms seized on the battlefield in Ukraine,” the U.S. Justice Department claimed at the time of the arrests.
“The court approved extradition on two of the four counts,” the Russian state-run news agency TASS quoted Uss’ lawyer as saying Tuesday.
The lawyer said Uss’s defense plans to appeal the court’s ruling.
Uss has been living under house arrest in Italy since November.
The entrepreneur also faces charges in the U.S. of violating sanctions against Russia and Venezuela, illegal transactions and money laundering.
He faces a combined total of up to 75 years in U.S. prison on the charges, the RBC news website reported, citing earlier claims by his defense team.
His father Alexander Uss, the governor of the Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia, has denounced his son’s arrest as “political.”
The Russian Interior Ministry placed Artyom Uss on its wanted list and Moscow’s Meschansky district court charged him with “the laundering of money or other property acquired in a criminal way as part of an organized group.”
These charges may give Moscow a legal way to request his extradition to Russia.
