Russia’s supreme court has reduced by only one year the 14-year sentence passed against Oksana Hladkykh, a mother of four abducted from her home in occupied Zaporizhzhia oblast in November 2023. This was presumably a cassation appeal, as the original sentence, passed on 7 June 2024 by the occupation ‘Zaporizhzhia regional court’, had been upheld on 7 November 2024 by the first court of appeal in Moscow. All of Russia’s ‘treason trials’, including the supreme court hearing which seems to have been at the end of October 2025, are behind closed doors with this one of the reasons why information is scant and often delayed. Although the supreme court ‘judges’ removed a part of the charge (the accusation of providing “other help to a foreign country”) and reduced the sentence from 14 to 13 years, they chose to see no reason to overturn a manifestly wrongful conviction on ‘treason’ charges under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code.
The reasons for dismissing the charges and releasing the 49-year-old Ukrainian could not have been clearer and were set out by the authoritative Memorial Support for Political Prisoners Project when it declared Oksana Hladkykh a political prisoner in August 2025. Hladkykh had never concealed her opposition to the Russian invaders and had openly expressed her views on social media, with this clearly the reason for her denunciation on a scurrilous Telegram channel aimed at hunting out those with a strong pro-Ukrainian position, as well as for her ‘arrest’ / abduction in late November 2023). Neighbours from Dobrivka have suggested to RIA-South that Hladkykh’s former husband, who supported the Russians, could have denounced her to curry favour with the invaders. It is also possible that Hladkykh had corresponded with somebody who claimed to be from HUR, and that this was, in fact, an FSB setup.
Memorial is scathing about the ‘treason’ charges under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code. Oksana Hladkykh (b. 11.09.1976) has four children, three of them under 18 (Sonya – 16; Vova – 13 and Zlata – 11). She was left with no alternative but to take Russian citizenship, as the children would otherwise not be enrolled in school, and could be taken from her. Given such coercion, it is absurd, Memorial says, to speak of ‘state treason’ with respect to the occupying state.
The prosecution had claimed that Hladkykh “had passed on to an employee of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence information about the location of Russian personnel and military equipment, as well as the coordinates of fortifications”. Hladkykh herself calls the charges fabricated and says that the pretext for her ‘arrest’ was a photograph found on her telephone.
Memorial notes that she was essentially accused of having sent a person she was communicating with by Internet information which was not secret about Russian sites on occupied territory. “These sites do not on principle have anything to do with Russia’s security as they are on the territory of another country.”
Hladkykh’s persecution is in violation of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War which strictly prohibits Russia as occupying state from applying its legislation on occupied territory. The sentence (whether 14 or 13 years) is clearly entirely disproportionate, especially given that Hladkykh has three underage children.
In writing about the cassation appeal ruling on 31 January 2026, RIA South said that Hladkykh’s persecution had become a symbol of how Ukrainians are punished on occupied territory for remaining true to Ukraine. Her neighbours from Dobrivka are convinced that she was seized because of her civic stand and because she was not afraid to speak the truth.
“Oksana was principled. From the outset, she opposed the invaders and was open in calling things by their proper name. She was not afraid to tell the invaders to their face what she thought of them. Her abduction was a warning to us all – so that we would be afraid to say a word against Russia.”
“Her only guilt is in being a Ukrainian and in the fact that she did not betray her country. That’s enough for them to imprison a person”,
As reported, much of the initial information about Oksana’s persecution came from an imprisoned Russian journalist Antonina Favorskaya and fellow Ukrainian political prisoner Yulia Koveshnikova. Oksana also has an adult daughter, Oleksandra, from her first marriage. She has explained that her stepfather drank and beat his wife, who took the children and moved from Dobrivka to the nearby urban settlement Pryazovske in Zaporizhzhia oblast. The area came under Russian occupation almost immediately. According to Oleksandra, her mother was devastated by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and openly told the Russian military posted close to their home to “leave our country”.
Her mother was disturbed by the scurrilous post on 15 January 2023, Oleksandra says, adding that they did discuss trying to leave. Oksana, however, had said that she had lived there for a long time, had friends there, and would find it hard to move.
The Russians came for Hladkykh on 24 November 2023. The children were not allowed inside, from where they heard screams. Their mother was taken away, with the Russians initially claiming that this was for four days. This was a brutal lie and Oksana Hladkykh was sentenced, for her patriotism and unwillingness to be cowered by the invaders, to a term of imprisonment higher than the sentences Russia regularly uses against murderers and other real criminals.
