Desperate SOS as Russia upholds brutally cynical sentence against abducted Kherson activist Iryna Horobtsova
A Russian court of appeal has refused to revoke the ten and a half-year sentence against Iryna Horobtsova although the Kherson software tester and civic activist had long been abducted and imprisoned when she was alleged to have ‘spied’ for her own country. The hearing at the Vlasikha military court of appeal in Moscow region took place a month after Iryna sent a desperate SOS from Russian prison on behalf of the huge number of Ukrainian woman hostages whom the Russians are holding prisoner. Each of them, she wrote, had willingly responded to the call to help their country, and had ended up imprisoned as a result. She called on Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian leaders to help ensure an exchange of all the Ukrainian women whom Russia is illegally imprisoning.
According to Iryna’s father, Volodymyr Horobtsov, the appeal hearing took place in Moscow on 31 March 2025. These are political cases and, unfortunately, rejection of the appeal was anticipated. Iryna is likely to be held in Moscow until 10 April, before being transferred back to occupied Crimea. Where she will be sent to serve the sentence is unclear. All such transfers are immensely gruelling, and especially dangerous as the political prisoner normally has no contact for a month or even two or three with his or her lawyer and family. The conditions in any Russian or Russian-controlled penal institutions are appalling, and Iryna has persistently been denied vital medication. Her father also expressed concern at how gaunt and thin she looks, and says she has lost 20 kilograms or more.
Iryna Horobtsova is turning 40 on 13 May 2025 – three years to the day since the Russian invaders burst into her parents’ home in Kherson and took her prisoner.
Iryna is an IT specialist who was working as a software tester in February 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and seized control of Kherson. Her company suggested that she work from abroad but she refused to leave Kherson and became very active as a volunteer. From the first days of the full-scale invasion, she bought bandages, painkillers, etc. and took them to the local hospital to help the wounded. She ignored the danger and drove medics to work in Kherson and the oblast, as well as delivering food and medicines to those in Kherson most in need. She openly expressed her opposition to the Russian invasion, including in posts on social media, and took part in the mass protests in the centre of Kherson which ended only after the Russians began shooting at protesters and mounting a terror campaign.
Iryna was at home with her 75-year-old mother when around 11 men in military gear, some of whom were masked, burst into their home on 13 May 2022. They carried out a search and removed computers and Iryna’s phone. They claimed that she was simply being taken away for questioning and would return that same day.
Her parents began desperately searching for Iryna the next morning, with the Russians then occupying Kherson refusing to provide any information or take the parcel with warmer clothes and other items which her parents had prepared.
This was an enforced disappearance, with Russia long refusing to provide any information about Iryna’s whereabouts. It was believed, and is now known to have been the case, that she was almost immediately taken to occupied Crimea. There she was imprisoned in the FSB-controlled SIZO No. 2, one of the remand prisons that Russia opened after its full-scale invasion.
At the request of her parents, Crimean lawyer Emil Kurbedinov began trying to find Iryna. It was only in late June that the FSB confirmed that she was in Russian captivity “for resisting the special military operation”, Russia’s euphemism for its war of aggression against Ukraine. They refused to provide any information about her whereabouts or let Kurbedinov see her.
It was almost two years later, in March 2024, that the Russians came up with ‘spying charges’, under Article 276 of Russia’s criminal code. Unless the Russian prosecutor general’s report simply contains a typo, Iryna Horobtsova was claimed to have ‘spied’ for Ukraine while held totally incommunicado in Russian-occupied Crimea. This, it was alleged, had been from February 2022 through March 2023. She was supposed to have gathered and passed to an official of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence information about the places of deployment, time, routes and movement of units of the Russian Federation armed forces and Rosgvardia on the territory of Kherson oblast; the types of military technology and arms, linking this to local maps and geolocating coordinates. The information passed on could have been used to direct fire at places where the Russian armed forces were deployed.”
The wording here is largely copy-pasted from one such abduction and ‘trial’ to another, with these immensely cynical charges applied by the aggressor state against Ukrainians abducted from Ukrainian territory and accused of ‘spying’ for their own country.
The ‘trial’ purportedly took place at the Russian occupation ‘Kherson regional court’ although the sentence, on 15 August 2024 was reported by the occupation ‘Crimean prosecutor’, with Horobtsova sentenced to ten and a half years’ imprisonment. If the above-mentioned prosecutor’s report that claims the ‘spying’ took place until March 2023 is not a mistake, it is unclear when the sentence is dated from.
An address for letters will be provided here as soon as it is known. PLEASE help Iryna Horobtsova by publicizing her case. Such publicity will not stop Russia from carrying out such lawless show trials, but it can increase the chances that Moscow will agree to an exchange of prisoners.
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