Halyna Dovhopola turned 71 on 27 March, her seventh birthday in Russian captivity for her unconcealed pro-Ukrainian position in occupied Crimea. She has not lost “a gram” of her fortitude, she writes, and remains true to her principles, however the Russian climate is terrible and she says that she will not survive another winter like last year, when there were six months of freezing cold. Halyna dreams of returning to mainland Ukraine. She would not be willing to return to Crimea (while under Russian occupation) and informs that in December 2025 she sent a formal application to reject the Russian citizenship (that Russia has made it all but impossible to not accept on occupied territory). She has, thus far, received only “an explanation”, without a yes or no.
Halyna was writing to Vladyslav Yesypenko, Ukrainian journalist and himself a former political prisoner and stressed how happy she had been to receive his letter. These are always a lifeline for political prisoners and Yesypenko notes that “as always” Halyna asked for nothing except for letter forms so that she can herself respond. She makes it clear that there are many things she would write if she could (but cannot, as all correspondence will be scrutinized). Such details will need to wait until she is released, but publicity is needed now to put pressure on Russia to agree to include her in a prisoner exchange. In her case, and that of essentially all Russia’s Crimean Tatar and other Ukrainian political prisoners, there is no chance of being released on parole, or even being moved to a minimum-security prison facility. The excuse is that this is because of the serious charge, however Russia has long used flawed and secretive ‘treason’, ‘spying’ or ‘terrorism’ charges as weapons of political persecution and the bottom line is that Ukrainian political prisoners are forced to serve sentences to the last day (with the FSB sometimes coming up with new charges to avoid releasing them at all).
“Here I have many friends among young people, and over the last 4.5 years (in the prison colony in Golovino the attitude towards me has changed fundamentally. Perhaps they have finally believed in my sincerity. As if all that was hard (the hardest) has passed.”
Halyna does, however, urgently need a hip replacement. She suffers from hip osteoarthritis, the deterioration of cartilage in the hip joint. This causes bones to rub together, leading to chronic pain, stiffness and restricted mobility. It is not quite clear what she means by saying that this will probably not happen “according to quota”, but in general the healthcare available in Russian prisons is extremely limited.
Although Halyna herself wrote no more about her state of health, Russian volunteers visited her almost a year ago and sounded the alarm, saying that they had scarcely recognized her.
The volunteers reported success in that the medication, fresh fruit and vegetables that they brought with them were accepted. It is to be hoped that they reached Halyna who had likely not seen any fresh food for months or years. It transpired that the prison even deducted money from her small pension for her supposed ‘board’, with this being enough to prevent starvation, but far below any standards for decent nutrition. The volunteers noted that she moved with difficulty, even when using a stick, and urgently needed to be examined by a neurologist. She had problems with high blood pressure even before her imprisonment, and since then has lost a lot of weight and developed gastritis from the conditions in Russian captivity. In another letter, she also wrote that she was “tired of fighting pain”.
The volunteers also wrote, however, that Halyna “has an incredible vitality which has helped her to not only give up, but to support others around her.”
Halyna Dovhopola (b. 27.03.1955) was one of at least four Ukrainians in occupied Crimea who were seized by the Russian FSB in 2019, soon after the Kremlin was forced to release 35 Ukrainian political prisoners to get Volodymyr Tsemakh, a crucial MH17 witness / suspect away from the Dutch prosecutors.
Judging by an interview Dovhopola gave to a Ukrainian website in May 2014, she and her adult daughter openly held and expressed pro-Ukrainian views. In March 2014, the Russian soldiers who had seized control told her daughter that if she did not remove the Ukrainian media that she sold in the kiosk she ran that they would set it alight, with her inside. The family were clearly terrified, and Halyna’s daughter and (at that stage) her only grandson, managed to get out and settled in Kyiv. Halyna explained then that she saw no possibility for herself of leaving her home in outer Sevastopol.
In a letter published by Graty in October 2021, Dovhopola described her ‘arrest’ and first FSB interrogation including one particularly menacing exchange: The FSB had clearly decided to claim that a visit to Kyiv which Dovhopola made in 2019 was linked with ‘spying activities’. It was nothing of the sort, as she explained, saying that she was there for the birth of her fourth grandchild. “I ask: “Have you ever been to Kyiv?” He answers: “I’ll enter Kyiv in a tank!” Everything went dark. “And how many people, on one side and the other, will perish for you to enter Kyiv in a tank?” Silence in response”.
The FSB claimed that Dovhopola, who was living in Sevastopol, worked for Ukraine’s Military Intelligence [HUR] and had gathered “information about an aviation regiment of the Black Sea Fleet”. The charges were under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code (‘state treason in the form of spying’). During the closed ‘trial’ before the Russian occupation ‘Sevastopol city court’, the prosecution claimed that Dovhopola had been “recruited by a representative of a foreign state to work covertly for the Military Intelligence Service of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.” She was alleged to have carried out “intelligence tasks aimed at gathering information about a separate aviation regiment of the Black Sea Fleet, its call-signals and other information linked with radio communications. This was supposed to have included ‘state secrets, the passing on which could be used to harm the security of the Russian Federation”.
She was taken almost immediately to Moscow and held prisoner at the Lefortovo SIZO [remand prison]. Both there and later, back in Sevastopol (for the ‘trial’) she was subjected to physical and verbal abuse.
It is not even clear how many ‘hearings’ there were in the ‘trial’ behind closed doors. Suspicion that the case was politically motivated was only compounded by the fact that the ‘judge’ in the case was Igor Kozhevnikov, a Russian citizen who was the presiding judge in the show trial and 14-year sentences passed against Oleksiy Bessarabov and Volodymyr Dudka. Dovhopola was sentenced on 24 March 2021 to 12 years’ imprisonment and a further year’s restriction of liberty, with the appeal later rejected without any information having been revealed.
In the above-mentioned letter, Halyna wrote “We are waiting here, and each of us is fighting for our life, so as to not “die in Russia” behind barbed wire. We ask you all not to forget about us! Glory to Ukraine!”
Please help to provide publicity about Halyna Dovhopola’s imprisonment and, if your country has diplomats in Russia, ask them to help (details here). Halyna has been imprisoned for almost seven years, and, if Russia is allowed its way, she will be held for another five years and more. And that is if she survives the horrific conditions.
Please also write to Halyna!
Letters need to be in Russian, handwritten and on ‘innocuous’ subjects. Chat GPT and other services have acceptable translation tools if writing in Russian is a problem..
Address (this can be written in Russian or English)
601395 РФ, Владимирская область, Судогодский район, п. Головино, ул. Советская, 50 «а», ФКУ ИК-1
Доvгополая, Галина Павловна, г.р. 1955
[In English:
601395 Russian Federation, Vladimir oblast, Golovino, Sovetskaya St, 50a, Prison Colony-1
Dovhopolaya, Galina Pavlovna, b. 1955 ]
