Halya Coynash, 18 June 2026

Melitopol mother of two sentenced to 14 years for donations to help Ukraine

The Russian invaders have not only imprisoned Maryna Meshkova for seeking to help the defenders of her country, but have shattered the lives of her two children

Melitopol under Russian occupation and machine guns Photo posted by Hromadske Radio

44-year-old Maryna Meshkova has been imprisoned since 25 July 2024, and has no idea where her two children are, and who is looking after them. This, and the 14-year sentence passed by Russia’s notorious Southern District Military Court on 16 June 2026, are Russia’s brutal reprisals for donations to those involved in defending Ukraine.

Maryna Meshkova (b. 12 November 1981) is from Melitopol, a city in Zaporizhzhia oblast which has been under Russian occupation since the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She was seized on 25 July 2024 and has, seemingly, been in Russian captivity ever since despite having two children under her care. She also suffers from chronic hepatitis, with this likely to be exacerbated by the appalling conditions in Russian and Russian occupation prisons and the near certain lack of adequate healthcare.

The charges against Meshkova were of ‘state treason’, under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code, and of ‘abetting terrorist activities’ (Article 205.1 § 1.1.) It was claimed that, from December 2023 to April 2024, she had sent money transfers both to bank cards collecting for Ukraine’s Armed Forces, and to accounts, linked with the Free Russia Legion. The latter is against the regime of Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and its members are fighting on Ukraine’s side. In March 2023, Russia’s supreme court declared it a ‘terrorist organization’, as it has the Ukrainian Armed Forces Azov Regiment, with both rulings used to justify ‘terrorism’ charges and massive sentences. Donations to the Free Russia Legion would, undoubtedly, have been cited as the grounds for charging Meshkova with ‘abetting terrorist activities’. It may also have been one of the grounds for the supposed ‘treason’ charges, however Russia has long been sentencing Ukrainians to 12 years and more on supposed ‘treason’ charges for having made donations to the Armed Forces defending their country. Russia has made it effectively impossible, especially for a person with children, to not take Russian citizenship. It then uses the citizenship to call them ‘Russians’ and treat support for Ukraine’s defenders as ‘treason’.

Russia holds all such ‘trials’ behind closed doors, with the lack of names on the Southern District Military Court website increasingly making it impossible to even know how a trial is progressing. Judging by the number of hearings, it seems likely that Meshkow rejected part or all of the charges, and will, hopefully, lodge an appeal. This is not because there is any real chance that a Russian court will provide a just ruling. The 14-year sentence in a medium-security prison colony, passed on 15 June 2026 by ‘judge’ Sakit Eskerkhanovich Lachnikov, is in clear violation of international law and political, as well as being particularly brutal given that two children are being deprived of their mother.

It remains unclear how the Russians even find out about such donations, with the uncertainty about this probably an extra mechanism for intimidating the population. Russia has passed a huge number of long sentences over donations in the past two years, and is increasingly targeting either very young people, and quite elderly Ukrainians. There are very strong grounds for concern about the health of many of these political prisoners, including, most recently, health issues in the case of Halyna Bekhter. Given the conditions in Russian penal institutions, the terms of imprisonment imposed in many cases are effectively death sentences.

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