MOSCOW An American linked by Moscow to U.S. intelligence services has been arrested in the southern Russian city of Voronezh on a drugs charge and could face three years in jail if convicted, officials said Tuesday.

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) identified the U.S. citizen as John Edward Tobbin, 24, who was arrested and placed in custody on February 1. The FSB said he did not face any spying charges, an AFP report said.

Tobbin was studying politics at the local university in Voronezh on a Fulbright scholarship and had received an official recommendation letter from the U.S. State Department, the FSB said.

Moscow said Tobbin was a graduate of an intelligence center based in Fort Huachuca, Arizona -- although the statement said the school was located in neighboring New Mexico.

Tobbin also studied at a foreign language institute in Monterey, California, the statement said, a school reputed to train intelligence officers for the U.S. State Department.

The U.S. Embassy in Moscow confirmed the arrest of a U.S. citizen who came to Voronezh on a U.S.-Russia government exchange but said privacy laws barred it from revealing any details in the case.

Moscow's announcement came a week after U.S. security agents arrested an employee with the FBI Intelligence Division's Soviet Section, Robert Hanssen, on charges of spying for Russia for the past 15 years.

Hanssen, 56, was charged last week with selling information that damaged U.S. security and compromised three Russian double agents working for the United States. A preliminary court hearing is scheduled for March 5 for the former deputy director of the FBI section covering the ex-Soviet Union.

Hanssen allegedly began to pass highly sensitive information to Moscow in 1985 and continued in the activity even after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Also this week, a spy trial of a Russian citizen who worked as a senior defense researcher for a Western think tank in Russia resumed in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow.

Igor Sutyagin, who faces as much as 20 years in prison if convicted of high treason, is charged with passing on information about Russian weapons systems constituting state secrets.