Iryna Horobtsova is turning 41 on 13 May 2026, exactly four years to the day since Russian invaders burst into her home in Kherson and took her prisoner. She is now imprisoned in Russia, serving a 10.5-year sentence upheld by three Russian or Russian occupation ‘courts’ despite not only the illegality of her very ‘trial’, but also an ironclad alibi. Iryna Horobtsova, a Ukrainian citizen, was convicted of having ‘spied’ for her own country at a time when she had already been held in Russian captivity for many months.
Iryna was 36 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and seized control of her native Kherson. As an IT specialist testing software for a leading Ukrainian IT company, she was offered the opportunity to work from abroad. She turned it down, remaining in occupied Kherson where she was active from the first days of the invasion as a volunteer. She obtained whatever medical supplies she could and took them to the local hospital to help the wounded. Undeterred by the evident danger, she insisted on driving medics to work in Kherson and the oblast and also delivered food and medicines to those in Kherson most in need. She was open in expressing her opposition to the Russian invasion and support for Ukraine’s Armed Forces. She also both took part in and wrote on social media about the mass protests in the centre of Kherson which ended only after the Russians began shooting at protesters and mounting a terror campaign.
Armed and massed Russians came for Iryna on 13 May 2022, her 37th birthday. She is believed to have been held, incommunicado and without any formal status or criminal charges being laid, in two Crimean SIZO [remand prisons]. Renowned Crimean lawyer Emil Kurbedinov was stopped from seeing Iryna, with it only in late June 2023 that the FSB confirmed that she was in Russian captivity “for resisting the special military operation”, Russia’s euphemism for its war of aggression against Ukraine. It has since become clear that such abductions and imprisonment without any charges for opposing Russia’s invasion were on instructions from Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
It was almost two years later, in March 2024, that the Russians came up with ‘spying charges’, under Article 276 of Russia’s criminal code – the ‘default charge’ used to somehow ‘legalize’ Russia’s abduction and imprisonment of civilian hostages from occupied territory. It was claimed that she had, from February 2022 through March 2023, gathered information about the places of deployment, time, routes and movement of Russian military and Rosgvardia units, etc. and passed this on to Ukraine’s Military Intelligence. She is thus supposed to have gathered such intelligence while held incommunicado in occupied Kherson oblast or Crimea.
While Russia had not officially acknowledged holding Iryna hostage before June 2023, the apparent attempt to pretend that she was at liberty until March 2023 is truly absurd. Her abduction was reported, among other places, here by August 2022 and by Human Rights Watch in December 2022. HRW cited a woman who had contacted Iryna’s parents in November to say that she had been held prisoner with their daughter. Iryna had told her that she had been held in solitary confinement for over three months, and that she had been blindfolded by her captors and taken to occupied Crimea “where she was interrogated twice, with the use of clear threats of violence and torture, about her pro-Ukrainian position.
Iryna Horobtsova’s ‘trial’ supposedly took place at the Russian occupation ‘Kherson regional court’ although the sentence, of ten and a half years’ medium-security imprisonment, was reported on 15 August 2024 by the occupation ‘Crimean prosecutor’
On 31 March 2025, the Vlasikha military court of appeal in Moscow region rejected the appeal against this sentence, with a cassation chamber of Russia’s supreme court also upholding the sentence on 10 September 2025.
PLEASE circulate information about Iryna Horobtsova, using the hashtag #FreeIrynaHorobtsova and, if possible, write to Iryna!
Letters tell her that she is not forgotten and Moscow that its actions are under scrutiny. Unfortunately, only letters in Russian and handwritten will be accepted, and best for Iryna’s sake to stay on ‘safe subjects’ (no politics, nothing about Russia’s war of aggression, etc.). Even just a card would be fine, if letters are hard to write, however ChatGPT and similar to have passable translation tools these days.
Address (which can be in Russian or English):
431160, РФ, Республика Мордовия, Зубово-Полянский р-н, п. Явас, ул. Чернореченская, д. 1, ФКУ ИК-2 УФСИН России по Республике Мордовия, Горобцова Ирина Владимировна, 1985 г. р.
[in English] 431160 Russia, Mordovia, Yavasm 1 Chernorechenskaya St, Prison Colony No. 2
Iryna Vladimirovna Horobtsova, b. 1985
