A kangaroo court in occupied Kherson oblast has sentenced Yulia Stanika to twelve and a half years’ imprisonment for donations to the Ukrainian Armed Forces defending her country. As it is doing in an ever-mounting number of cases, the aggressor state has used the Russian citizenship it forced the 30-year-old Ukrainian to take as excuse for accusing her of ‘state treason’ for remaining a patriot of her own country.
Russia has imposed a near blackout on information about occupied territory, and nothing is known with any certainty about when Yulia Stanika was taken prisoner. It was first reported in September 2025 that she was to go on ‘trial’, with the occupation ‘authorities’ reporting that evidence of donations to Ukraine’s Armed Forces had been ‘uncovered’ on Stanika’s mobile phone. She was supposed to have made these from September 2023 to January 2024.
It remains unclear how such donations are, in fact, discovered, but all these ‘trials’ are, undoubtedly, aimed at warning other Ukrainians of maximum surveillance and of maximum repression for the smallest act of patriotism.
The next information was, typically, that Stankina had been found ‘guilty’ of treason, under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code, by the occupation ‘Kherson regional court’.
Such pseudo ‘trials’ are entirely illegal since Russia is violating international law through its imposition of Russian legislation on occupied Ukrainian territory. There are, however, multiple other grounds for concern. Nothing is known about the ‘judges’ who passed sentence, whether Stanika had a lawyer and, in fact, where there was a ‘trial’, as opposed to a single ‘hearing’ at which Stanika, held in a cage for maximum propaganda footage, was sentenced to twelve and a half years in a medium security prison colony, with a subsequent two-year period of restricted liberty.
The occupation ‘prosecutor’s’ report on 24 October 2024 asserts that Stanika was “found guilty under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code, committed by providing financial assistance to a foreign state [sic!] for activities directed against the security of the Russian Federation.”
The supposed ‘crime’ , consisting of several bank transfers to a ‘foreign bank account’ between September 2023 and January 2024, had been discovered and investigated by the occupation FSB.
All such ‘trials’, even those held in Russian courts, are behind closed doors, however the report on 24 October actually mentioned the secrecy, claiming it to be because of information, purportedly consisting of a ‘state secret’.
Since it is not claimed that she ‘admitted the charges’, she may well lodge an appeal,
Such sentences for donations are becoming extremely common. The victims are normally accused of ‘treason’, except where the money was to support the Ukrainian Armed Forces Azov Regiment, or other military units, which the aggressor state is, incredibly, claiming to be ‘terrorist organizations’. On those occasions, the person is accused of ‘financing terrorism’’ for donations to Ukraine’s defenders.
It is disturbingly often the case that we do not even know the victim’s name. In occupied Melitopol, for example, an unnamed pensioner (b. 1960) was sentenced to 14 years’ on or before 21 October 2025 for donations of just four and a half thousand roubles (around 48 euros) to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In March 2025, a 63-year-old woman from Melitopol was reported as being accused of ‘treason’ for bank transfers of the equivalent of around 50 euros.
Although the size of the donations makes the huge sentences seem even more monstrous, it is worth remembering that, in present conditions, these would not necessarily have been small amounts for those sending the donations.
It is also a telling antidote to all the Russian propaganda claims that these donations to Ukraine’s Armed Forces continue, despite the considerable danger faced by each Ukrainian caught.
