WARSAW (Reuters) -A Canadian teenager sentenced in Poland last year to 20 months in prison for spying for Russia could be released early under certain conditions, a Polish court said on Tuesday.
A statement by the court did not give details of the possible conditional release.
Europe is in a heightened state of alert over what security agencies across the continent call Russia’s “hybrid war” of sabotage and espionage – accusations which the Kremlin has repeatedly denied.
Laken Pavan, who turned 18 a few weeks after his arrest, pleaded guilty to charges of helping Russian intelligence and was sentenced in December 2024. He is due to leave prison in January 2026.
On April 16, 2024 Pavan flew from Vancouver to Moscow via Istanbul and joined a volunteer group in the Russian-occupied eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, according to Polish court documents seen by Reuters.
The organisation’s social media account said it was set up in 2014 to recruit mercenaries to fight for Russia in Donetsk and the neighbouring Ukrainian region of Luhansk and to organise humanitarian projects for civilians.
Pavan told Polish investigators that in late April 2024 he was arrested in Donetsk and questioned by men who said they were from Russia’s Federal Security Service, according to the court documents.
After several days of detention, Pavan said, he was instructed to return to Europe, lose his passport to conceal his trip to Russia and begin working for the FSB, the documents showed.
He told Polish prosecutors he flew to Copenhagen, but later decided to move to Warsaw as life in Denmark was too expensive.
A couple of days after checking into a Warsaw budget hotel, Pavan said, he asked a receptionist to call police. When they arrived, he confessed to working with the FSB and planning to pass information about Poland’s military to his Russian handler, the court documents showed.
(Reporting by Anna Koper; editing by Mark Heinrich)
