Russia Charges U.S.-Russian Brothers Over Oil

MOSCOW — Russia has charged two brothers with dual Russian-American citizenship on charges of gathering secret information aimed at giving foreign oil companies a competitive advantage, the Federal Security Service said yesterday.

The service said one of the men was an employee of TNK-BP, a major Russian oil company half-owned by British Petroleum, and that the other, his brother, was an employee of the British Council, the overseas cultural arm of the British government.

A spokeswoman for the British Embassy in Moscow, however, said the latter man, Alexander Zaslavsky, was not a council employee but a member of the "Alumni Club," a group set up by the council for Russians who have studied in Britain.

The service, the main KGB successor agency known under its Russian acronym FSB, said the two men were detained March 12 and released the same day on obligation not to leave town.

Police searched the Moscow offices of BP and TNK-BP on Wednesday. TNK-BP declined to comment to the Associated Press, and the American Embassy had no immediate comment.

The Wednesday searches turned up "business cards of representatives of foreign defense departments and the [American] Central Intelligence Agency," an FSB statement said.

It was not clear whether either of the arrested brothers was believed to have foreign intelligence connections.