Forced 'to wake up a foreign citizen in her own country’. Kateryna Korovina sentenced to 10 years for opposing Russia’s occupation

Russia’s notorious Southern District Military Court has sentenced 29-year-old Kateryna Korovina to ten years’ imprisonment over less than 11 euros in donations supporting Ukraine.  Key elements in the case, reported by MediaZona, echo those of an anonymous sentence announced by the Russian occupation ‘Investigative committee’ and Russian propaganda media on 4 March 2025.  There are, however, important differences, which raise questions if the two ‘trials’ were, in fact, one. 

Kateryna Korovina (b. 6 October 1996) is from Pishchane, a village very near Starobilsk in Luhansk oblast which came under Russian occupation at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  In Starobilsk, as in other Ukrainian cities, Ukrainians came out onto the street to oppose the invaders, tried to block their tanks, etc. and also burned the flag of Russia’s fake ‘Luhansk people’s republic’.  Such protests typically continued until the invaders began shooting at protesters and abducting those unafraid of expressing their opposition.

Kateryna Korovina clearly also opposed the invasion and refused to take Russian citizenship.  During her final address to the court, she said:

“I don’t know in which corner of the world, in which other country you could wake up a foreign citizen in your own home, where you were born and grew up.  This is something surreal!  And what was I supposed to do?  Take the passport of a country alien to me?  What happens if tomorrow China turns up?  Do I take a Chinese passport as well?  What am I, some kind of Agent 007?  Why am I forced at all to take an alien passport and continue to live, pretending that nothing is happening.”

Kateryna was living with her parents when abducted by the Russians.  Mediazona has spoken with Kateryna’s mother, Valentina, who says that her daughter had not been formally employed but had received small payments for articles that she wrote.  She says that she does not know where these were published.

According to their report, Korovina was seized on 19 March 2024.  She was accosted on her way to the chemist by two men, one of whom said that he was a police officer and insisted that she come to their car, claiming that she was similar to some young woman who had lost her purse.   Korovina says that she was confused and went with the men, however they held her by the arm all the way, so she clearly had no choice.  A third man joined them at the car, whom the report identifies as a 29-year-old FSB captain called Maksim.  He told Kateryna that she was under arrest on a charge of spying, and took away her phone.  Looking through it, he came upon a photo which had Russian equipment in the background, with this probably the pretext for the initial charge of passing information to Ukraine’s Military Intelligence.

Since both that accusation and the subsequent charges pertained to material obtained after Kateryna’s ‘arrest’, it seems likely that she was initially targeted purely because her opposition to Russia’s occupation had been noticed or, conceivably, because of something she had written.

She spent several hours being grilled in the car, with another FSB officer (‘Andrei) joining them after a while and threatening that if Kateryna did not “cooperate in a good way, they would act in a bad way”.   She was then taken to the occupation ‘police station’ where they continued to interrogate her on her attitude to the war and to Russian occupation.  There too, Andrei took an aggressive line, which she has said, in a letter from prison, she viewed as a psychological attack and which made her flustered and unable to concentrate.

The FSB also forced her to provide the password for her bank account and proceeded to look through banking transactions.  ‘Maksim’ identified two recent transfers and claimed that the money had gone to finance ‘Right Sector’ [a Ukrainian nationalist organization which Russia has long demonized and has, since November 2014, banned as ‘extremist’] as well as the Aidar Battalion and Azov Regiment.  The two latter are both part of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, but Russia has used its increasingly political supreme court to label them as ‘terrorist’.   

Kateryna denied any such direction for her donations and says that they were purely for humanitarian purposes, to help the civilian population.

After hours of interrogation, pressure and fairly clear threats of torture, she signed a piece of paper stating that she had, in total, sent several hundred hryvnia (10-11 euros) to support the Ukrainian Armed Forces.  She was forced to make ‘a confession’ to supporting the Azov Regiment and Right Sector on a video.  She was obviously in a terrible state and could not memorize the supposed ‘confession’ which she eventually simple read out from the crib held by one of her captors.

It was that ‘confession’ which formed the basis of illegal charges laid under Russian legislation.  Korovina was accused of ‘financing / abetting terrorism’ because of alleged donations to the Azov regiment, under Article 205.1 § 1.1 of Russia’s criminal code) and of ‘financing extremist activities’ over supposed donations to Right Sector ((Article 282.3 § 1).

Korovina stated in court that she had given the ‘confession’ out of fear of torture and insisted that her donations had been to volunteers collecting money for the civilian population, for example, to buy heaters.

Korovina’s captors also carried out a search of her home.  She recalls that, on the way to her home, the FSB officers continued to claim that Ukraine as a state had never existed, nor had Ukrainians as a separate nation.

The FSB were extremely aggressive to Kateryna’s brother, Kostiantyn, threatening to shoot him for any “wrong movement”.  They later added a threat to go for Kostiantyn as well if Kateryna retracted her ‘cooperation’ [i.e. the false ‘confession’).

Unusually Korovina was initially released under an undertaking not to leave Pishchane.  It was on 10 June 2024 that armed and masked men turned up in several cars, with this ‘operation’ videoed and added to the earlier ‘confession’ for  an FSB propaganda video   Kateryna’s ‘cooperation’ on that occasion was obtained through even more direct threats – namely a machine gun directed at her.

Korovina did retract her ‘confession’ in court and denied the charges.  That was ignored by ‘judge’ Aleksander Vasilievich Generalov from the Southern District Military Court in Rostov who, on 17 February 2025, sentenced her to 10 years in a medium-security prison colony [the worst available in the case of female prisoners].  For Generalov this was the latest of multiple ‘trials’ and illegal sentences against Crimean Tatar and other Ukrainian political prisoners.  The sentence is not final and will, it seems, be appealed, meaning that, for the moment, she will remain at the SIZO [remand prison] in Rostov where she is illegally held prisoner. 

It is likely that Kateryna Korovina is the unnamed woman whose sentence, purportedly passed by an occupation ‘court’ in Russia’s so-called ‘Luhansk people’s republic’, was reported on 4 March 2025.  There are problems with this, however, since the 4 March reports claim that the donations were from January to April 2024, i.e. long after Korovina had first been seized.  It is also very unusual for the FSB to seize a Ukrainian, come up with charges and then release then for almost three months.

One of the aims of all repression against Ukrainians living on Ukrainian territory and supporting the defenders of that territory is undoubtedly to instil terror in other civilians and deter them from any forms of support for their own country. There have been occasions where Russian propaganda media report a horrific sentence twice, each time as though it has just happened, and it is possible that the same tactics are at play here.

Please write to Kateryna Korovina!

Such letters send a vital message to Kateryna and to Moscow that she is not forgotten.  Letters need to be in Russian, handwritten, and on ‘safe’ subjects.  If that is a problem, use the sample letter below (copying it by hand), perhaps adding a picture or photo. Do add a return address so that the men can answer. 

Sample letter

Привет,

Желаю Вам крепкого здоровья и надеюсь, Вы скоро вернетесь домой, к своим родным.  Простите, что мало пишу – мне трудно писать по-русски, но мы все о Вас помним.

[Hi.  I wish you good health and hope that you will soon be home, with your family. I’m sorry that this letter is short – it’s hard for me to write in Russian., but you are not forgotten. ] 

Address

344022, Россия, Ростов-на-Дону, ул. Максима Горького, 219 СИЗО-1.

Коровиной Екатерине Анатольевне 1996 г.р.

 [In English:  344022 Russian Federation, Rostov on the Don, 219 Maxim Gorky St, SIZO-1

Korovina, Yekaterina Anatolievna, b. 1996 ]