A Russian occupation ‘court’ has convicted 50-year-old Volodymyr Yatsun of ‘spying’, on Ukrainian territory for Ukraine, and sentenced him to 12 years’ maximum-security imprisonment. The spying charges, under Article 276 of Russia’s criminal code, were essentially copy-pasted from other such ‘trials’, and have been brought against many Ukrainian civilians who were first abducted and held incommunicado for long periods of time. Yatsun’s case stands out, however, as he was abducted from his home in Berdiansk twice, and able to provide information about his experiences in captivity.
The civic initiative for political prisoners Politzek reports that Yatsun was seized by Russian FSB in March 2023 and held prisoner until the end of August that year when he was released. His relatives had, apparently, reported his disappearance and he had ended up on the list of people missing or wanted for questioning. It is not quite clear why this would have bothered Russia’s FSB who appear evermore certain of their own impunity, however Politzek.org says that it was after he was taken off this list, that the Russians came for him again. Despite their claim that he was being taken away to have his fingerprints taken, Yatsun disappeared.
Nothing was heard of him for over a year. Then in August 2024, he was charged with ‘spying’. According to Politzek’s information, Yatsun said that he had been held in ‘basements’ [which the Russian invaders have, in any place where they seized control, set up torture chambers]. After the spying charge was laid, he was moved to SIZO [remand prison] No. 1 in occupied Donetsk.
As is very often the case, there is no proof that there was a ‘trial’, merely the 21 November 2025 stunt, largely for the FSB video, in which Yatsun is shown in a ‘court cage’, with a 12-year sentence in a maximum-security prison colony being announced. The sentence is supposed to have been passed by the entirely illegal, and largely anonymous, ‘Zaporizhzhia regional court’. The FSB for occupied Zaporizhzhia oblast, who are supposed to have circulated the video, almost certainly staged Yatsun’s ‘arrest’ long after the Ukrainian was in Russian captivity.
Volodymyr Yatsun (b. 1975) is described as a Ukrainian citizen and “opponent of the special military operation”, Russia’s euphemism for its war of aggression against Ukraine. It is claimed that, in February 2023, Yatsun described to pass on to Ukraine information about the deployment of Russian military in Berdiansk, with this so that Ukraine’s Armed Forces could carry out strikes. He purportedly found a pro-Ukrainian channel on Telegram for this purpose and, from February through March 2023, used a chat-bot to pass on information about the location of Russian military units and technology.
With particular absurdity, the report claims that, since Yatsun had done his military service in the Ukrainian air and missile defence forces from 1994 to 1996, he had supposedly understood that his actions “were aimed against the security of the Russian Federation”, that is, the country which had illegally invaded and was occupying Ukrainian Berdiansk.
Virtually identical ‘spying’ charges are regularly announced against Ukrainian civilians sometimes as much as two years after they were abducted and disappeared. The spying charges enable Russia to hold any proceedings behind closed doors, making scrutiny impossible, even of those ‘trials’ held in Russia’s Southern District Military Court (rather than occupied territory).. Where information has become available, it is clear that the victims have been subjected to torture. While this is partly to extract fake ‘confessions’, many former hostages have described their captors as torturing ‘fore entertainment’.
