Russia passes 10-year sentence over two years after abducting and torturing 20-year-old Kherson student

An illegal occupation ‘court’ has sentenced 23-year-old Hanna Yeltsova to ten years’ imprisonment on ‘spying charges’ announced, together with her supposed ‘arrest’ in occupied Crimea, over two years after the young student was illegally abducted from occupied Kherson oblast.   The 10-year sentence in a medium security prison colony reported on 13 February 2025, was claimed to have been handed down by the occupation ‘Kherson regional court’, however the Crimean Human Rights Group reports that Hanna was held in occupied Crimea since at least August 2023.  Russia undoubtedly opts for ‘spying’ charges, under Article 276 of the Russian criminal code, against civilians it has abducted and held hostage because of the total secrecy it can impose about such ‘trials’.  This case is especially chilling as Russia is even trying to conceal the fact that Hanna was held incommunicado and almost certainly tortured for nearly two years by claiming to have arrested her in October 2024.

Hanna Yeltsova was 20, and in her final year at the Kherson State University, when she was seized by the Russian invaders from her grandmother’s home in the village of Ahaimany (Kherson oblast).  This was on 29 November 2022, 18 days after Kherson itself had been liberated, with Hanna having expressed her joy that Kherson had been freed on her social media page.

Yetsova was allowed a very brief call to her parents in December 2022 with a ‘videoed confession’ for Russian propaganda media appearing at the end of December.  By this stage, Hanna had been held incommunicado, without access to a lawyer and without any legal status, for a full month.  All of that alone would make it near certain that the alleged ‘confession’ had been obtained through torture and other forms of duress.  In fact, we also know how such videos are obtained from virtually every Ukrainian who has since been released or has at least gained access to an independent lawyer.  Although men in their twenties and thirties are often subjected to the most savage levels of torture, such methods are applied against both men and women.  The victim is typically forced to learn their supposed confession off by heart, and is threatened, if they do not cooperate, with another torture session in which they are subjected to beatings, electric currents attached to genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, mock executions, and others.

On the video, Hanna was shown saying that she considered her alleged actions to have been mistaken and admitting that they could have led to people’s deaths.  In talking about representatives of an invading army, she said, almost certainly under duress, that “they are also someone’s children, someone’s husbands, fathers, I could have killed.”

After this, Hanna remained in captivity, first in Kherson oblast, then, from August 2023 at the latest, in occupied Crimea. It is unclear whether the FSB in Crimea had forgotten about the video from December 2022, or whether they are so certain of their own impunity and of the willingness of collaborating ‘judges’ to pass the sentences demanded that they don’t care about evident discrepancies.

The latter are certainly glaring.  On 18 October 2024, it was reported that a “resident of Kherson oblast spying for Ukraine’s Security Service [SBU] had been detained in Crimea.  The FSB claimed that the young woman had “established contact with members of the SBU and that, on instructions from her ‘handler’, had gathered information which she sent via Messenger regarding the deployment of Russian military in Kherson oblast”.

This is essentially the same charge as that brought against many Ukrainian civilian hostages abducted from occupied territory.  Even were the claim true, Russia would still be in violation of international law for bringing such charges against a Ukrainian illegally prosecuted by the aggressor state.  With Russia using fake and largely anonymous courts and holding Ukrainians hostage, without any charges being laid and without an independent lawyer,  there are no grounds for assuming any truth in the allegations made.