The chore of taking them to the airport then fell to one of their professors, Valery Gostev, a lecturer in missile design, who recalls how their faces turned white as they sat in the departure lounge. "They were terrified of going home," he says. An aging engineer of the old Soviet school, who favors tweed blazers and orthopedic shoes, Gostev had never thought very hard until that day about the distant Asian government whose citizens he had been assigned to train. He started asking the students about their leaders, and they told him, warily, that Burma is run by a military junta. "I asked them, Why do you need these rockets?" he says. "And they told me, The same reason you keep dogs in your yard — to scare people off."
For decades, that has been the main prerogative of Burma's government, which has been run by a clique of paranoid generals since 1962 until late 2010, when the country began a transition to civilian rule. The generals, however, still retain enormous influence. Their rule, which often mimics the regime in North Korea, has used their country's natural-resource wealth to build up a powerful army — purchasing weapons stockpiles and building a network of underground bunkers — while the population sank into abject poverty.
According to rights watchdog Freedom House, Burma ranks among the "worst of the worst" regimes in the world. Its relations with the U.S. saw a breakthrough this month when Hillary Clinton became the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit Burma in more than 50 years. But Burma remains under international sanctions for its human-rights abuses and is considered a pariah state. One of Burma's more prominent partners during its decades of isolation, aside from China and North Korea, has been Russia, which began accepting large numbers of Burmese military officers into its schools since 2001, the same year Russia agreed to build a small nuclear reactor for Burma. (In parallel, Russia reached a deal to sell Burma fighter jets and heavy artillery.)
The reactor sale was formalized in 2007 and, according to the contract, included training for "300-350 nuclear-energy specialists." It also stipulated that the reactor would be used not for military purposes but for scientific and medical research. But that explanation did not sit will with the world's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. As a portion of its economy, Burma spends more on its military and less on health care than almost any other country in the world, and the idea that it would splurge on a reactor worth $150 million just to make medical isotopes seemed ridiculous. A reactor that small "would represent no threat to world peace," Robert Kelley, a former director at the IAEA, wrote in an op-ed last month. "But without inspections, there would be constant concerns that even a small facility could be used for nefarious purposes." So far, however, Burma has refused to sign the nuclear agreements that would allow for IAEA inspections, even after evidence surfaced last year of a secret weapons program.
The source of that evidence was Sai Thein Win, a former major in the Burmese military. In 2010, he defected to the West with a cache of secret documents and photographs, which were published by the Democratic Voice of Burma, an opposition news agency based in Oslo. One of the documents appeared to be a military order for a "bomb reactor," while many of the photos showed Sai Thein Win posing with missile parts or with equipment that could be used to enrich uranium. He spoke to TIME by phone in October, but asked not to reveal his location. "If they know where I am, it would not be hard for them to have me taken out."
By his estimate, around 10,000 Burmese students, mostly military officers, have studied at Russia's technical universities, and many of them were sent specifically as part of a nuclear program. He was among the first. In 2001, he says he became one of only three Ph.D. students accepted into Bauman's secretive rocket-engines department, where Gostev is a lecturer. "There was one guy from North Korea, one guy from Iran, and me," Sai Thein Win says. "The only guy who completed the degree in the end was the North Korean, so his rockets would be the ones flying tests over Japanese islands by now." Sai Thein Win's career was less prodigious.
After completing his studies at Bauman in 2005, he became the deputy head of a military workshop in Burma whose mission, he says, was to produce parts for Burma's secret nuclear-weapons program. Sai Thein Win said the bulk of the machine-building equipment at his workshop was purchased from German companies, who were told it was for civilian research. The more sensitive components of the weapons program were acquired from North Korea, while the training in nuclear science and missile design, Sai Thein Win says, was from Russia.
In the West, his revelations caused an uproar. Senator Jim Webb, the chairman of the Senate's subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, canceled his mission to Burma until it clarified the allegations. The U.S. raised alarms of illegal weapons shipments from North Korea to Burma, and in June of this year, a U.S. Navy destroyer confronted a North Korean ship on its way to Burma, forcing it to turn back. After studying Sai Thein Win's documents, Kelley, who is also a U.S. nuclear scientist and former weapons inspector for the IAEA, concluded they were proof of Burma's covert nuclear-weapons program. "Like their model, North Korea, the [Burmese] junta hopes to remain safe from foreign interference by being too dangerous to invade," Kelley wrote at the time. "Nuclear weapons contribute to that immunity."
The wave of scrutiny did not focus on Russia's role, but amid the international pressure, Moscow still backed away from the reactor sale that it had finalized in 2007. Burma also started waving the white flag, telling the IAEA that it could not afford a nuclear program and was not pursuing one. The agency took the junta on its word, and the matter was thought to be closed.
But this fall, TIME learned that Burmese officers had continued their studies at Bauman. Gostev, the professor of rocket science, says he is still teaching a dozen Burmese students in his missile-design class, as he does every semester, while other departments are instructing them in nuclear science. The question is, What for?
If the curriculum is focused on helping the Burmese build missiles, then Russia would not be in violation of any international agreements. "The Russians would just be showing pretty bad taste in what they are teaching people," says Kelley, pointing out that such missiles could be used to carry chemical or biological agents, which would qualify as weapons of mass destruction.
The motivation for Russia, he says, would most likely be financial. Tuition for a foreign student, particularly one learning sensitive technologies, would be as much as $60,000 per year, a great help to Russia's chronically underfunded universities. Russian corporations have also been eyeing Burma's natural resources. Early this summer, the Russian geophysical company DMNG opened an office in Rangoon to help look for oil and minerals, and officials from Gazprom, Russia's gas monopoly, visited Burma in August. Although it may seem odious to swap weapons and sensitive know-how for access to resources, the U.S. engages in such deals all the time, and they do not violate international laws.
The more worrying questions would arise if, as Sai Thein Win claims, Burma is still pursuing a nuclear program. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Moscow signed in 1968, Russia is obliged "not in any way to assist, encourage or induce" any other state to manufacture nuclear weapons. "So we do think Russia should be careful about providing a lot of this training to Burma," says Andrea Stricker, an expert at the Institute for Science and International Security, who has studied Burma's military. "There are still a lot of suspicions about a possible [nuclear-]weapons program."
The exact nature of the Burmese curriculum, however, remains unclear, and both Kelley and Stricker were inclined to give Russia the benefit of the doubt. "I'm pretty sure that if [the Burmese] said they want to learn [nuclear-]bomb design, the answer would be no." But when TIME tried to clarify what the students were studying, Bauman University declined to help, citing its confidentiality agreement with the Burmese embassy in Moscow. "There is a clause in our contract that keeps us from disclosing what the [Burmese] students study or for how long," explained Anna Lustina, a university spokeswoman. "With any other foreign students it would be fine, but we have a special agreement with the Burmese."
The students are just as reticent. Most Sundays, when the weather in Moscow permits, they can still be found playing soccer at Bauman's sports center. But when a reporter approaches with questions about their schoolwork, their faces go pale. "We can't talk to you," one of them said in stilted Russian, holding the ball to his chest. "Please go away." Then they cautiously returned to their game.
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