Absolutely.
His subsequent career—and I'm not sure for how many years, as I haven't analyzed it completely—did focus for quite a long time on national defence and national security issues. Those issues would, for obvious reasons, have been of great interest to Russia's intelligence services, particularly in this recent period when they've been engaged in overt aggression against Ukraine and other countries.
At the time when he was recruited, which is what these files tell us the story of, it's not clear what he was going to do as a journalist. He was starting out. I think the Ottawa Citizen is mentioned as a first employer. I'm not sure what he was working on at that time, but later one of his main areas of focus was national security and national defence, as you say.