Russia’s illegal ‘Zaporizhzhia regional court’ has sentenced Larysa Bieliaieva to 14 years’ imprisonment, accusing the Ukrainian doctor from Liubymivka in Zaporizhzhia oblast of ‘treason’ for supporting her own country by buying Ukrainian war bonds. This is a slight variation on a shocking trend with the Russian invaders having over the past year and more churned out a huge number of long sentences against Ukrainian men and women in their 60s and 70s for donations to Ukraine’s Armed Forces. It is typical that the occupation court’s report on the sentence posted a video from the sentencing of Svitlana Loi, a 69-year-old pensioner from occupied Tokmak who was sentenced to 15 years for supporting Ukraine’s defenders.
Occupation media posted the seizure of Larysa Bieliaieva (b. 10.02.1960) in August 2025. RIA South reports that she was originally held prison at the SIZO, or remand prison, in occupied Donetsk, but was then moved to occupied Crimea for the supposed ‘trial’. According to the authoritative Memorial Support for Political Prisoners Project which has added Larysa Bieliaieva to its list of people whose prosecution is almost certainly politically motivated, she is currently held at a SIZO in occupied Sevastopol.
The charge against Larysa Bieliaieva was, quite literally, that she had supported those defending her native Ukraine by purchasing 102 war bonds, worth just over three thousand euros, via the Diia app on her telephone. Russia has made it all but impossible to live on occupied territory without taking Russian citizenship. Older people are especially vulnerable as, without a Russian passport, they cannot receive either a pension or medical care. Having thus foisted its citizenship on Ukrainians living in their own country, the aggressor state then charges them with ‘treason’ for their patriotism.
The occupation ‘court’ website reported the sentence on 23 April 2026, although it was seemingly passed the day before. It repeated the above indictment, suggesting that that the woman, referred to only as ‘B’ and described as a “Russian citizen” was motivated by “hostility to the current Russian authorities” to carry out “financing directed at the Ukrainian Armed Forces needs”. It was asserted that, through her purchase of the 102 Ukrainian war bonds, she had “provided financial assistance to the armed forces of a foreign state [sic] in activities aimed against the security of the Russian Federation.”
The 66-year-old doctor was sentenced to 14 years, meaning that she would be 80 if she survived the appalling conditions of Russian and Russian occupation prison colonies. This same kangaroo court also added a further one year of restricted liberty, until she was 81.
It is vital that information is circulated about Larysa Bieliaieva, as well as other pensioners like her, who have been convicted of ‘treason’ and received monstrous sentences for their patriotism. Russia is calling them ‘Russians’ with this making iit vital that the real reason for their persecution is widely known. It is likely that only international attention and scrutiny are the only way of forcing Russia to stop such appalling torment on elderly people for supporting their country.
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