Not long after disembarking from an airplane at Ben-Gurion International Airport on Sept. 2, Artem Kirpichenok, a dual Russian-Israeli citizen, was hustled away by Shin Bet officials and taken into custody.

According to reports in Russian media, two days later, the historian was indicted on several counts of espionage. The Russian newspaper Izvestia reported that he is being held in the maximum-security wing of Ayalon Prison. The paper also reported that he had visited Iran several times, including a two-week stay in the fall of 2018. He is charged, among other things, with contact with foreign intelligence operatives.

Kirpichenok’s lawyer said in an update about his client last week that the indictment was scheduled to be read in court on Friday and that he will remain in prison after a request to transfer him to house arrest was denied.

The alleged spy’s lawyer slammed his client’s treatment, despite previously saying in the same statement that “Artem’s condition is satisfactory.”

“They lead him bent almost double, with shackles on his wrists and ankles and a heavy weight attached to the chains. Looking at Artem, I kept remembering Dostoevsky’s novels and everything nineteenth-century Russian literature wrote about prisoners sent to penal colonies,” the lawyer said.

“I was deeply upset, and I will not hide that from you. In ten years of legal practice and working in the courts, I have never seen anyone escorted like this. Even people accused of murder are not treated this way,” he added. “This is unprecedented. I have never seen anything like it.”

Nika Dubrovsky, his co-author on a history book, slammed the arrest on X, saying that Kirpichenok “might just as well be accused of being in contact with aliens.”

“Arrests like this resemble human sacrifice: their only purpose is to unite society around a common danger and hatred of an ‘enemy,'” she added.