Olha Pichurina is the latest victim of Russia’s very specific ‘Ukrainian spy-mania’ on occupied territory. Although Russia began using the total secrecy around spying trials to imprison political prisoners from 2014, there has been a huge increase in the number of such trials since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Only the names of the victims and the length of the sentences change, with the charges virtually copy-pasted from one indictment to the next. Very many of the ‘trials’ are of men or women abducted and held incommunicado for months or even years, with the only common factor in all such cases is that the victims had pronounced pro-Ukrainian views.
Olha Pichurina
Russia’s prosecutor general first reported on 17 October that the 46-year-old from Mariupol was to go on ‘trial’ in the Russian proxy ‘Donetsk people’s republic.’ In violation of international law which prohibits an occupying state from using its legislation on occupied territory, the charge against Pichurina was of ‘espionage’ under Article 276 of Russia’s criminal code.
Virtually nothing is known about Pichurina, but she is described as a Ukrainian citizen, and Russia made no attempt to charge her with ‘state treason in the form of spying’ [Article 275). That suggests that she had either only recently returned to occupied Mariupol, or had resisted Russia’s measures of coercion, including denial of healthcare and of property riots, used to force Ukrainians on occupied territory to accept Russian citizenship.
It was claimed that she had, from May to July 2023, gathered information about places of deployment of Russian national guard in the city and passed this to Ukraine’s Military Intelligence [HUR]. This appears in most such ‘trials’, as does the following sentence which claims that the information could have been used to fire at the places where Russian military are deployed.
Almost a month later, on 13 October 2024, the occupation ‘Donetsk people’s republic high court’ reported that they had sentenced Pichurina to 11 years’ imprisonment for supposedly ‘spying for Ukraine’. Women are sentenced to medium-security prison colonies, however the conditions there too, and the treatment of Ukrainian prisoners, are still appalling.
All such ‘courts’ on occupied territory are illegal and the ‘high court’ here was notorious even before Russia’s full-scale invasion for churning out horrific sentences against tortured Ukrainian civilian hostages. There is nothing to indicate who the so-called ‘judges’ were and whether there was more than one hearing If there was only one because Pichurina admitted to the charges, it is likely that such a ‘confession’ was extracted through torture or other forms of duress, and certainly without her having an independent lawyer.
Dmytro Shainoha
TASS reported on 24 October that Dmytro Shainoha, a 41-year-old Ukrainian from occupied Tokmak (Zaporizhzhia oblast) had been sentenced by the occupation ‘Zaporizhzhia regional court’, to 12 years in a harsh-regime (maximum-security) prison colony. The charges were identical to those against Olha Pichurina, with the main difference being that he was accused of such ‘spying’ from August to October 2022.
If the gap of over a year between Pichurina’s likely abducted by the Russians and news of an imminent ‘trial’ was already ominous, the situation in Shainoha’s case is positively chilling. He was abducted by the Russians in October 2022 and held incommunicado, in occupied Crimea) for over a year and a half. Such periods where there are no charges and where, generally, a person’s ‘detention’ has not been admitted, are especially dangerous. They are typically used by the FSB and other Russian enforcement officers to torture and threaten a person into signing whatever ‘confession’ put in front of them.
The independent Telegram channel Crimean Tribune cites its own source as reporting that Shainoha is gravely ill after being held for part of the period of incommunicado imprisonment with a man suffering from tuberculosis. Shainoha was not a ‘detainee’ or remand prisoner, but a civilian hostage, the victim of an enforced disappearance and, almost certainly, of torture.
Update
It is tragically difficult to keep up with all these sentences. It seems that a very young woman, Victoria Kletchenko is also serving a sentence for supposed ‘spying’ after being abducted from her home in occupied Nova Kakhovka (Kherson oblast) back in March 2023. The charges are the same as those above, however she was ‘tried’ at the Rostov regional court and sentenced to ten years. According to her aunt, she is now imprisoned in the city of Avov (Rostov oblast)
