Halyna Dovhopola turns 70, imprisoned in Russia for remaining true to Ukraine in occupied Crimea
Halyna Dovhopola should be spending her 70th birthday on 27 March 2025 with her daughter and grandchildren. Instead, she is imprisoned in Russia, with the aggressor state which invaded and occupied her native Crimea having sentenced Halyna to 12 years on supposed ‘treason’ charges. There is every reason to assume that Halyna Dovhopola’s ‘treason’ lay solely in her love of Ukraine and opposition to Russia’s occupation.
Dovhopola is one of at least four Ukrainians in occupied Crimea who were seized by the Russian FSB in 2019, soon after the Kremlin was forced to release 35 Ukrainian political prisoners to get Volodymyr Tsemakh, a crucial MH17 witness / suspect away from the Dutch prosecutors. Many then assumed that Moscow was, in this way, replenishing its ‘exchange list’ for future leverage. Over five years later, however, all of those victims of Russian repression, including Halyna Dovhopola, remain in Russian captivity. The conditions in Russian penal institutions are appalling even for much younger people, and the near-certain failure to provide any adequate healthcare is an additional form of torture. Pessure has increased on any Ukrainians in Russian captivity since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Halyna Dovhopola desperately needs our voices to ensure that she is released in the next exchange of prisoners, and so that she knows she is not forgotten.
Halyna Dovhopola was born in Bakhchysarai on 27 March 1955, but spent most of her life in a settlement close to Sevastopol. Judging by an interview Dovhopola gave to a Ukrainian website in May 2014, she and her adult daughter openly held and expressed pro-Ukrainian views. In March 2014, the Russian soldiers who had seized control told her daughter that if she did not remove the Ukrainian media that she sold in the kiosk she ran that they would set it alight, with her inside. The family were clearly terrified, and Halyna’s daughter and (at that stage) only son, managed to get out and settled in Kyiv. Halyna explained then that she saw no possibility for herself of leaving her home in outer Sevastopol.
Russia’s ‘trials’ of Crimeans on ‘spying’ or ‘treason’ charges are invariably held behind closed doors by illegitimate occupation ‘courts’. In the vast majority of cases, including that of Dovhopola, the FSB or other ‘investigators’ use the detainee’s isolation to torture out ‘confessions’ and to prevent her / him from having access to an independent lawyer.
In a letter published by Graty in October 2021, Dovhopola described her ‘arrest’ and first FSB interrogation including one particularly menacing exchange: The FSB had clearly decided to claim that a visit to Kyiv which Dovhopola made in 2019 was linked with ‘spying activities’. It was nothing of the sort, as she explained, saying that she was there for the birth of her fourth grandchild. “I ask Have you ever been to Kyiv?” He answers: “I’ll enter Kyiv in a tank!” Everything went dark. “And how many people, on one side and the other, will perish for you to enter Kyiv in a tank?” Silence in response”.
The FSB claimed that Dovhopola, who was living in Sevastopol, worked for Ukraine’s Military Intelligence [HUR] and had gathered “information about an aviation regiment of the Black Sea Fleet”. The charges were under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code (‘state treason in the form of spying’). During the closed ‘trial’ before the Russian occupation ‘Sevastopol city court’, the prosecution claimed that Dovhopola had been “recruited by a representative of a foreign state to work covertly for the Military Intelligence Service of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.” She was alleged to have carried out “intelligence tasks aimed at gathering information about a separate aviation regiment of the Black Sea Fleet, its call-signals and other information linked with radio communications. This was supposed to have included ‘state secrets, the passing on which could be used to harm the security of the Russian Federation”.
Variations on this theme have been repeated countless times since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While impossible to carry out any check of the information, it seems very likely that Dovhopola was targeted because of her pro-Ukrainian stand, with the charges fabricated.
Dovhopola was taken almost immediately to Moscow and held prisoner at the Lefortovo SIZO [remand prison]. Both there and later, back in Sevastopol (for the ‘trial’) she was subjected to physical and verbal abuse.
It is not even clear how many ‘hearings’ there were in the ‘trial’ behind closed doors. Suspicion that the case was politically motivated was only compounded by the fact that the ‘judge’ in the case was Igor Kozhevnikov, a Russian citizen who was the presiding judge in the show trial and 14-year sentences passed against Oleksiy Bessarabov and Volodymyr Dudka. Dovhopola was sentenced on 24 March 2021 to 12 years’ imprisonment and a further year’s restriction of liberty, with the appeal later rejected without any information having been revealed.
Halyna concluded her letter with the following words: “We are waiting here, and each of us is fighting for our life, so as to not “die in Russia” behind barbed wire. We ask you all not to forget about us! Glory to Ukraine!”
Please help Halyna by raising public awareness of her ongoing imprisonment and by writing to her! Letters need to be in Russian, handwritten and on ‘innocuous’ subjects. If it is not possible to write in Russian, you could send a photo or picture with the following lines.
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 (this can be written in Russian or English)
601395 РФ, Владимирская область, Судогодский район, п. Головино, ул. Советская, 50 «а», ФКУ ИК-1
Доvгополая, Галина Павловна, г.р. 1955
[In English:
601395 Russian Federation, Vladimir oblast, Golovino, Sovetskaya St, 50a, Prison Colony-1
Dovhopolaya, Galina Pavlovna, b. 1955 ]