60-year-old from Russian-occupied Donbas sentenced to 13 years for donations to Ukraine’s defenders

60-year-old Serhiy Shtyrov from occupied Yenakiieve (Donetsk oblast) has been sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment in the harshest of Russian penal institutions.  The Russian occupiers claimed that by donating money to Ukraine’s Armed Forces, the Ukrainian had committed ‘state treason’ against Russia.   

Russia has used every form of coercion, including denial of medical care and pensions, to Ukrainians on occupied territory unless they take Russian citizenship.  It then uses the latter as excuse for forcibly mobilizing Ukrainians to fight against their own country and for ‘trials’ under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code (‘state treason’) for supporting Ukraine. 

Although neither the so-called ‘Donetsk people’s republic high court’ record of the ‘trial’, nor the occupation prosecutor’s report name the Ukrainian, his name and photo were revealed by, among others, the Russian state controlled TASS agency, in January 2025.  Shtyrov was called a resident of Yenakiieve in the so-called Donetsk people’s republic’, with Russia’s FSB claiming that he had made several payments to accounts used to finance Ukraine’s Armed Forces, with this purportedly ‘treason’.

Nothing more was heard until 29 May 2025 when the occupation ‘court’ and ‘prosecutor’ announced that Shtyrov had been found ‘guilty’ of treason under Article 275.  The verdict and sentence of 13 years’ maximum-security imprisonment and a 400 thousand rouble fine had been passed by ’judge’ Dmitry Aleksandrovich Yeremin from the ‘DPR high court’. 

Since the ‘case’ had only been passed to the ‘court’ on 20 May 2025, and there were effectively no hearings, it seems likely that Shtyrov was subjected to torture and/or other illegal methods of coercion to get him to ‘admit the charges’.  The identity of his ‘lawyer’ is also concealed, with it probable that he or she was appointed by the ‘investigators’.  In virtually all cases to date against Ukrainian political prisoners, such appointed lawyers have confined their activities to trying to persuade the person to ‘confess’.  In occupied Crimea, they have sat and watched, without any comment when the pollical prisoners were tortured.

Although ‘confessions’ in this instance would be to entirely legal donations to Shtyrov’s own country, the defence should have, at least, demonstrated that this could not constitute ‘state treason’.  The lack of hearings indicates that this did not happen.

The description of Shtyrov’s activities in supporting his country’s defenders is surreal. The ‘court’ supposedly established that “from August to September 2024, the wrongdoer, while at his home in Yenakiieve and using a mobile app of one of the bans, transferred money to provide financial assistance to the foreign state [sic] Ukraine for activities aimed against the security of the Russian Federation.” 

The charges are also chilling, with it very likely that one of the reasons for these ‘arrests’ and such horrific sentences is to terrorize the population.  It is just possible that Shtyrov was seized because of his pro-Ukrainian views, with the bank transfers only discovered when the FSB began going through his telephone.  There have, however, been a number of such prosecutions over the last year and the suspicion arises that the mobile apps are either fakes, aimed at catching Ukrainians supporting their country, or that banks are actively providing the regime with information about their clients. 

Refusal to take Russian citizenship is also no protection, as Russia has issued extraordinary ‘rulings’, outlawing units of the Ukrainian Army (the Azov Regiment; the Aidar and the Donbas Battalions; and, most recently, the 48th Separate Assault Battalion, named after Noman Çelebicihan  ‘terrorist’ organizations.  It then claims that donations to these units counted as ‘financing terrorism’. 

See also:

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

Ivan Semykoz  Russia sentences Ukrainian to 8.5 years for donation as a teenager to Ukraine’s Azov Regiment

Stanislav Rudenko  Chilling surveillance methods as Russia sentences Ukrainian to 10 years for donation to defend Ukraine

Lilia Kachariova and S.N. Dovhopola  Huge sentences and videoed ‘repentance’ in Russia’s mounting terror in occupied Zaporizhzhia oblast