Spying case: Belarusian KGB agent used to live in Lithuania, witness says

Lithuanian citizen Romuald Lipskij, a former employee of state company Oro Navigacija (Air Navigation), is currently standing trial for alleged spying and handover of information to Kurulenko.

“I am not acquainted with Lipskij, but I know Sergey Kurulenko. He was my classmate, we graduated from school together,” Olga Kiricenko, a witness in Lipskij’s spying trial, told the court on Thursday.

The woman used to live in Tauragė and Ukmergė, Lithuania, and now resides in the Russian region of Kaliningrad. She said she lost contact with Kurulenko and her other classmates and later the former classmates started communicating via an online social group.

Kiricenko and Kurulenko attended the same school in Ukmergė but they lost contact once again in 2013 as Kurulenko stopped responding to messages and logging in to his account.

The witness also told the court she owned an apartment in Vilnius and let Kurulenko stay there. He told her he was in tourism business.

Lipskij is now on trial for spying for Belarus. On Nov. 10, 2014, the Lithuanian Prosecutor General‘s Office and the State Security Department said Lipskij was charged with spying for Belarus. The court was presented with seven volumes of case materials, including 1,300 documents and 26 storage devises with various audio and video recordings.

The Prosecutor General’s Office said the suspect, who at the time worked for Oro Navigacija, used to secretly make photos of documents and other objects and gave the information to the Chief Intelligence Board of the Belarusian Armed Forces’ General Staff.

Lipskij denies any wrongdoing and said the information he presented to a Belarusian citizen was publicly accessible.

He is facing up to 15 years in prison.