Russian volunteers have managed to visit Crimean political prisoner Halyna Dovhopola in the Vladimir oblast prison colony and scarcely recognized the 70-year-old who has been imprisoned for almost six years. Halyna is one of several hundred Ukrainian political prisoners and civilian hostages, but her age and state of health make it particularly critical that pressure is placed on Russia to release her.
Vladyslav Yesypenko, who is now, thankfully, a former Ukrainian political prisoner, has shared the volunteers’ account of their visit to the prison colony in Golovino, where Halyna is held.
They had to arrive at 7 a.m. in order to ensure that they would have a place in the queue both to pass on food products and medicine, and to see Halyna. Fortunately, the fruit and vegetables, as well, seemingly, as the medication were accepted. The conditions in all Russian penal institutions are appalling, with that in Golovino no exception. It seems that the prison service even deducts money from Halyna’s small pension ‘for her board’, although the food provided is, at best, sufficient to ensure that a person does not die of starvation. If the prison administration does, indeed, pass on what the volunteers brought, these may well be the first fruit and vegetables that Halyna will have seen in months, if not years. Small wonder that the woman writing the account of the visit said that she had scarcely recognized Halyna, with the six years in Russian captivity having taken a huge toll on her health, and on her appearance. She also moves with difficulty, even when using a stick, and urgently needs to be examined by a neurologist. Dental work is also needed after another prisoner attacked Halyna and knocked out a tooth, after the Ukrainian reacted sharply to the woman expressing support for Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s regime. At present, there is “something metallic” where the tooth was, with this likely to be very uncomfortable.
The volunteers were able to speak with Halyna for around two hours. She learned from them, with joy, of Vladyslav Yesypenko’s release, with believes that he will make all effort to secure her release and that of the others imprisoned.
“Halyna draws a lot, makes dolls and knits children’s things for infants in the prison colony.
She has an incredible vitality which has helped her to not only give up, but to support others around her.”
Halyna Dovhopola’s inner strength has been clear from the outset in all of the letters she has written from imprisonment. It is, however, inevitable that her health has suffered badly, not least from the “foul climate” in Russia, which is very different from in Crimea. She had problems with high blood pressure even before her imprisonment, and since then has lost a lot of weight and developed gastritis from the conditions in Russian captivity In another recent letter, she also wrote, worryingly, that she is “tired of fighting pain”.
Halyna Dovhopola turned 70 on 27 March 2025, far from her home in Sevastopol and from her daughter and grandchildren in Kyiv. She was 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.
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) her only grandson, 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.
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”.
She 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.
Russia has been staging ‘trials’ against Ukrainians on ‘treason’ charges on a frighteningly mass scale in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The charges are suspiciously like those against Halyna Dovhopola, both in the indictment and in the lack of any possibility of verifying them. It does seem extremely likely that she was targeted because of her pro-Ukrainian views and openly expressed opposition to Russian occupation.
In the above-mentioned letter, Halyna wrote “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!”
The situation is now urgent, and any help in publicizing it could, literally, save Halyna Dovhopola’s life! Please help if you can! Suggestions as to how other countries’ diplomatic representatives in Russia can play a direct role can be found here.
Please also write to Halyna!
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
