— [The prosecutor] asked us to conduct additional investigations to furnish more compelling evidence of Nikitin’s espionage activities – and this we can do, says Yevgeny Lukin, spokesman for the Federal Security Service (FSB) in St. Petersburg, in an interview with St. Petersburg Times.

Lukin could not say, however, how long the additional investigations would take, or when Nikitin would have his day in court, writes the newspaper.

Tatyana Vasilyeva, spokeswomen for the prosecutor’s office in St. Petersburg, said to St. Petersburg Times that her office had ordered FSB to assemble a group of military experts, to determine whether or not Nikitin’s contributions to the Bellona report on the Northern Fleet contain classified information. This will be the fourth such military expert group assembled in the course of the case. None of the previous groups related the case to the Federal laws, but rather to sub-legal orders issued by the Ministry of Defence in 1993.