Yuriy Pohoreliak (b. 1964) was sentenced by an illegal occupation ‘court’ to 12 years’ imprisonment in the appalling conditions of a maximum-security prison colony. The Ukrainian pensioner was charged by the invaders of his country with ‘spying’ for having allegedly passed on information to Ukraine about Russian soldiers illegally present on Ukrainian territory.
Although the sentence was, purportedly, handed down by the occupation ‘Zaporizhzhia regional court’, it was reported by the ‘prosecutor’ of occupied Crimea on 30 December 2025. It is quite possible that the so-called ‘trial’ was over in the time it took to read out the sentence against Pohoreliak. The report was accompanied by an FSB video in which two men in full military gear force an evidently unarmed man probably twice their age to the ground and place entirely unnecessary handcuffs on him. He is then shown ‘admitting to spying and repenting’, with his ‘confession’ almost certainly obtained through torture and / or threats.
Virtually nothing is known about Pohoreliak except his year of birth and that he is from occupied Vasylivka raion in Zaporizhzhia oblast. It is, however, clear, since he was charged with ‘spying’, under Article 276 of Russia’s criminal code, not ‘treason’ (Article 275) that he does not have Russian citizenship. Although that could be a principled stand, Russia has made it increasingly difficult, by now next to impossible, to live on occupied territory without taking Russian citizenship, and it could, unfortunately, indicate that he has been in Russian captivity for well over two years.
It was claimed that in October 2022 Pohoreliak, because of his opposition to what the report calls Russia’s ‘special military operation’, contacted a friend serving in Ukraine’s Armed Forces and expressed willingness “to assist activities against the Russian Federation”. He had, supposedly, passed on by telephone information about the deployment of Russian military technology and personnel of a motor rifle battalion near his home, with this having continued until July 2023. Virtually all such sentences repeat the same basic indictment following them, with the claim that the information could have been used by Ukraine’s Armed Forces to direct strikes.
In December 2025, the Russian human rights initiative ‘First Department’ reported that 2025 had broken all records for the number of so-called ‘spying’ and ‘treason’ sentences passed by Russian (and Russian occupation) courts. The study found that, since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the articles of Russia’s criminal code on ‘state treason, spying and confidential cooperation’ had turned “into one of the key tools of political repression”, with the fact that all such cases are classified and the ‘trials’ held behind closed doors making it very difficult to understand the real scale and nature of the persecution.
While the study did not separate out sentences passed against Ukrainians from occupied territory, ‘spying’ charges seem to have become the default charges against the Ukrainian civilians abducted in the first period of Russia’s full-scale invasion, usually tortured and held for long periods of time incommunicado.
See:
Yehor Kuch
Mykola Holodny, Serhiy Honcharov, Yuriy Zinchenko
Russia churns out mass sentences for ‘spying’, with only the part of occupied Ukraine varying
Serhiy Petryk
Doctor first abducted from occupied Donbas in 2015 sentenced to 15 years ‘for spying for Ukraine’
Iryna Horobtsova
Serhiy Tsyhipa
