An illegal occupation ‘court’ has sentenced 34-year-old Anna Bieliaieva to 14 years’ imprisonment, almost three years after the Berdiansk woman was abducted from her home and held incommunicado, without any charges being laid, for 14 months. There would be no reason to pretend that Bieliaieva was ‘arrested’ in December 2024, had there been any evidence to back ‘spying’ charges aside from ‘confessions’ likely extracted through torture after she was seized in September 2023. The crude deception means that, yet again, Russia has imprisoned a Ukrainian for alleged spying that she could not have carried out as she was in Russian captivity.
Anna Bieliaieva (b. 20.01.1992) was in danger from the moment the Russians invaded and occupied Berdiansk in Zaporizhzhia oblast. Her partner was serving in Ukraine’s Armed Forces and was killed defending Mariupol at the Azovstal Steel Works on 11 May 2022. Her brother is also serving in the Ukrainian Army.
This was certainly enough for her to be targeted by the Russian invaders, as was effectively confirmed by the occupation ‘Zaporizhzhia regional court’’. The latter asserts that, after her partner’s death, “the woman developed a consistently negative attitude to the SVO [the so-called special military operation, i.e. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine] and to Russia’s armed forces.”
The Russians claimed that Bieliaieva had, in 2023, contacted her brother and offered to pass on information to Ukraine’s Armed Forces about Russian military technology passing through her area. Her brother was supposed to have put her in contact with an unidentified officer from a special unit.
All credit would be due to Anna Bieliaieva, a Ukrainian living on Ukrainian territory, had she indeed passed on information about the invaders to the defenders of her country. There is, however, little sense in repeating the information about military vehicles, etc. that she was alleged to have passed on “to the enemy”, as this was, purportedly, from May 2023 through October 2024. Since she was abducted by the Russians on 20 September 2023, that period covered 13 months when she was held incommunicado in Russian captivity.
She was charged with ‘spying’ under Article 276 of Russia’s criminal code, with the invading power accusing a Ukrainian citizen of “providing information to a foreign intelligence service or person acting in the latter’s interests for use against the RF’s security.” Bieliaieva was sentenced to 14 years’ medium-security imprisonment (the harshest in the case of women). All ‘spying’ and ‘treason’ trials are invariably held behind closed doors, with the outcome reported after the sentence has been passed. It is unclear whether there even were hearings in the case; whether Bieliaieva had a lawyer of her choosing; and who the ‘judge’ was from this puppet ‘Zaporizhzhia regional court’.
The Russians began abducting Ukrainian civilians from any territory which they seized, with their victims often held for months or years without any charges or contact with their families. This is a particularly dangerous time, with the FSB typically using the fact that there is no official record and the person is held incommunicado, to use torture and other illegal forms of duress. Among those tortured to death in Russian captivity while held incommunicado were 27-year-old journalist Victoria Roshchyna and 63-year-old Dniprorudne Mayor Yevhen Matvyeyev. Russia then continues such secrecy through ‘spying trials’ behind closed doors, with convictions and long sentences guaranteed even where there is compelling and irrefutable evidence that a person was imprisoned at the time that s/he was claimed to have carried out such activities. This was the case with Iryna Horobtsova, from Kherson, who was abducted on 13 May 2022 (her 37th birthday), yet was later sentenced for ‘spying’ claimed to have continued until the end of March 2023 (see: Help to #FreeIrynaHorobtsova - seized by the Russians on her birthday, sentenced to 10.5 years for Ukrainian patriotism )
