Russia sentences 19-year-old Ukrainian to 8 years for ‘spying for Ukraine’ as a young boy

A fake ‘court’ in occupied Luhansk oblast has sentenced 19-year-old Kyrylo Shcherbak to eight years’ imprisonment for what it claimed was ‘spying for Ukraine’.  While it is standard for the aggressor state to call supporting ones country ‘spying’, its persecution of the young man hits a new low as Kyrylo would have been only 16 at the time of his alleged ‘spying’ and may well have been imprisoned for the past three years.

Russia has imposed such an information blockade on parts of Ukraine under occupation that virtually nothing is known about Kyrylo Shcherbak.  The fact that he is imprisoned and was ‘on trial’ was learned only when his sentence was reported on 6 June 2025.  Since he was ‘tried’ as a Ukrainian citizen under Article 276 of Russia’s criminal code (‘spying’), it seems most likely that he is from one of the parts of Luhansk oblast which were seized and occupied after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. 

The Russian / Russian occupation reports claim that Kyrylo Shcherbak, from May through December 2022, “voluntarily gathered information” about the deployment and movements of Russian soldiers around what the Russian sources assert was “the territory of the Luhansk people’s republic”.  The latter is, in any case, an illegal Russian proxy formation which Moscow used from 2014 to try to justify first its covert, later open occupation of Ukrainian territory.  The claim is, however, also a historical distortion as the territory in question would have been invaded and occupied after Russia finally dropped its pretence and ‘recognized its own proxy ‘republic’ on the eve of the full-scale invasion.  It was only at the end of September 2022 that Russia staged its farcical ‘referendum at gunpoint’ and claimed that the territory had ‘joined the Russian Federation’.

In short, Kyrylo was accused of having, as a young Ukrainian, passed information to Ukraine’s Security Service about the military of an invading state illegally waging war on Ukrainian territory.  Anyone else would call this the actions of a young patriotic lad in defence of his country.  Russia claimed it to be spying and illegally applied its criminal code to sentence him to eight years.  This travesty was enacted in the so-called ‘Luhansk people’s republic high court’ with no information as to how long the alleged ‘trial’ took; whether Kyrylo had a lawyer; and who passed ‘sentence’. It is clear from the screenshot posted of Kyrylo in the ‘court cage’ that he is imprisoned, but nothing is said of when he was ‘arrested’.  Since the alleged ‘spying’ was until the end of December 2022, he was presumably abducted soon afterwards. Age was clearly not viewed as an impediment, although it is acknowledged in the reports that he was underage when the supposed ‘spying’ had taken place, with this probably the reason why the sentence was shorter than such ‘courts’ normally hand down on ‘spying’ charges. It is also for a medium-security prison colony, rather than the customary ‘harsh regime’, or maximum-security penal institutions. 

Kyrylo Shcherbak is one of several Ukrainians from Luhansk oblast abducted by the Russians as teenagers and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for supporting Ukraine.

On 10 April 2025, the same fake ‘LPR court’ sentenced Artem Kudzhanov to 12 years’ imprisonment more than two and a half years after the young student, then 19, was abducted from his home and disappeared.  Not only did the ‘spying’ charges seem copy-pasted from those used in numerous other such ‘trials’, but they came after the teenager was held totally incommunicado for over a year and then accused of something quite different. 

Ivan Semykoz was sentenced at the end of January 2025 to 8.5 years’ maximum-security imprisonment imprisonment over a single donation that the then 19-year-old Ukrainian from occupied Bilovodsk (Luhansk oblast) made to the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ Azov Regiment.  This was claimed to constitute ‘financing terrorist activities’. The young man was shown during an earlier report on 30 October 2024 giving ‘a confession’, with this almost certainly while he was held incommunicado, without access to an independent lawyer.

This was the second of two sentences passed over donations to the Azov Regiment, with the Russian Investigative Committee reporting an 8.5-year sentence on 8 August 2024, but not mentioning either the victim’s name, or the ‘court’ which had issued the sentence.

On 17 July 2024, a Russian court sentenced 19-year-old Danylo Yefimov from occupied Snizhne (Donetsk oblast) to 12 years in a maximum-security prison colony.  In his case, the young man had made several money transfers (around $144 in total) to the Serhiy Prytula Foundation, with this discovered when the young man tried to go on holiday with his family to Turkey.  After two terms of administrative arrest on fabricated charges, the Russians charged Danylo with ‘state treason’.  The young man had clearly been subjected to torture, and also doubtless agreed to admit to the charges in the hope of a lower sentence.  He was brutally deceived, with the 12-year sentence of maximum-security, or ‘harsh regime’ imprisonment.