Russian court ignores abduction and torture, increasing huge sentence against Ukrainian for trying to rescue his mother

A Russian court has upheld the 11-year sentence against Ivan Zabavsky, a young Ukrainian seized by the Russians when he tried to rescue his mother from a Kharkiv oblast village on the frontline. In fact, the St. Petersburg second court of appeal effectively increased his sentence by refusing to count the first ten months during which the young man was held incommunicado, without any charges being laid, and subjected to savage torture and ill-treatment.

In reporting on the appeal hearing on 17 June 2025, Mediazona cited Zabavsky’s lawyer, Andrei Chertkov since journalists were not allowed into the courtroom even for the reading out of the ruling.  Mediazona explains that they were only informed of this immediately prior to the hearing, with the latter to be held in a ‘special secret courtroom’.  After the three ‘judges’ entered this room, a loudspeaker in the corridor began emitting ‘white noise’, with this apparently frequently done where a case purportedly involves ‘state secrets’. 

Zabavsky was charged with ‘spying’ under Article 276 of Russia’s criminal code, with this a favourite when ‘trying’ civilians abducted from occupied territory as all parts of the ‘trial’ are held behind closed doors.  The ‘investigators’ typically use torture, threats or other forms of duress to try to prevent the person from having an independent lawyer.  Where that does not work, they invariably force the lawyer to sign a non-disclosure commitment, with the very real threat of prosecution if they reveal any details.

It does, however, seem safe to assume that had there really been justification for the ‘spying’ charges in this case, Russia would not have held the young man prisoner, without any charges and, therefore, procedural status for around ten months.

All that is known about the charge are formulations that seem to be copy-pasted from ‘trial’ to ‘trial’.  The young Ukrainian, seized by invading Russian forces on Ukrainian territory, was accused of having passed to “a foreign intelligence service’ [Ukraine’s Security Service] “information for use against Russia’s security”.

There was no reason for Zabavsky’s original ‘trial’ to be held in St. Petersburg, rather than in Rostov, where the vast majority of Russia’s illegal ‘trials’ of abducted Ukrainian civilians take place.  Whether that was a deliberate move to hide all evidence of the ‘trial’ is unclear, however it was thanks to Mediazona’s vigilance in noticing the case details at the St. Petersburg court that Ivan’s mother, Maryna Zabavska learned that her son had been remanded in custody on ‘spying’ charges.

As reported, Zabavsky is now 29 and back in 2022 was living and working in Kharkiv.  His mother, however, was in Tavilzhanka, a village in the Kupiansk raion of Kharkiv oblast which had briefly fallen under Russian occupation and which, even after its liberation, remained very much on the frontline. 

In September 2022, Maryna Zabavka’s sister was killed in shelling and Maryna decided to try to get to her son in Kharkiv.  It was, however, impossible to travel directly, and she was forced to travel through both occupied Ukrainian territory and Russia.   

All contact with the village had been cut off because of the fighting, with this meaning that she could not warn her son, and he had no way of knowing that she had left the village.  He, therefore, set off from Kharkiv to try to rescue her.  Since Tavilzhanka was in a frontline zone, the only way he could reach it was by delivering humanitarian aid.  He borrowed a friend’s car and filled it with bread, etc. in order to get to Tavilzhanka and bring his mother back with him.

Zabavsky disappeared at the end of September 2022, with Maryna learning later when she returned to Ukraine and spoke with neighbours that her son had been taken away by Russian invaders. It was only in May 2023 that Maryna received confirmation from Russia’s defence ministry that her son was in Russian captivity.  The ministry used only its standard claim that Ivan had been ““detained for resisting the special military operation” [Russia’s euphemism for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine]. 

Two months later, in late July 2023, it was learned that Zabavsky had been “arrested” on spying changes.  It is clearly that date, when Russia turned its enforced disappearance of a Ukrainian civilian into an ‘arrest’, which is now being treated as the beginning of his incarceration.

It was not, as Zabavsky was able to confirm in a brief note smuggled out immediately after the original sentence of 11 years’ maximum-security (‘harsh-regime’) imprisonment. This was handed down by the St. Petersburg municipal court on 30 January 2025 January 2025. He spoke of “the long and terrible ten months in captivity when a day seemed like a year, when I was beaten at least two, sometimes three, times a day.”  “Electricity, rubber batons, my legs were like traffic lights, with some bruises fading, others appearing, and it was like that every day.” He mentioned also constant hunger, with prisoners given portions of no less than 100-150 grams.

The person who showed the note to Mediazona asserted that Zabavsky had admitted to having helped Ukraine’s Security Service, and “carried out those actions mentioned in the case material.”  He insisted, however, that he had done so purely in order to save his mother who had ended up in a battle zone. There is no way of knowing whether that was, in fact, the case and, if he really did admit to the charges, then why, especially since he did lodge an appeal against the original ruling. His final address, reported by Pyervy Otdel [First Department] to the court of appeal is, indeed, anything but a ‘confession’.

In this statement he wrote that he had, for three years, been in Russia’s ‘meat-grinder system which crushes everybody and everything”. 

“I will not be hypocritical and will articulate what all have long known, but are afraid to say.  I’ll begin with my detention.  What the military of a foreign state were doing in Kharkiv oblast is for citizens of Ukraine a mystery, and for Russian nationals ‘ ‘liberation’. They liberated me from my home; my car; my district; my brothers and sisters.  And from my freedom and peaceful life.”

Zabavsky explained that he had been seized after Russian soldiers found photos they didn’t like in his phone.  He described to the court the torture that he had endured, and said that for the first seven days he had been tortured for eight hours daily. “On the seventh day, they thrust papers for signing next to my bloodied face”.

For ten months, he was illegally held in SIZO [remand prison] without any procedural status and was savagely beaten.

“My guilt is in being a Ukrainian who lived close to the border and who became a hostage to circumstances, defending my home and country.  You essentially abducted me and I fell into your meat-grinder system. And you are trying me by the laws of your country although I did not come to you.  In your country people are imprisoned even “on somebody’s claims”, without proof, on instructions “to put him away”.

In this ‘meat-grinder system’ which has tortured a young man for trying to save his mother, ‘judges’ also obey orders, with two Russian ‘courts’ having now ignored international law and clear evidence that Ivan Zabavsky was the victim of an abduction, illegal imprisonment and savage torture.