A Crimean occupation ‘court’ has sentenced 45-year-old Olha Tsyryk to 16 years’ imprisonment after a ‘trial’ behind closed doors lasting around an hour and a half. The 30 June 2026 sentence on suspiciously standard ‘treason’ charges is monstrous, and likely to be counted from September 2025 when the Crimean FSB reported her supposed ‘arrest’. It is, however, known that she had been abducted at least a year earlier and held incommunicado in SIZO No. 2, a notorious remand prison in Simferopol, believed to be controlled by Russia’s FSB and used for holding political prisoners.
Olha Tsyryk (b. 15 November 1980) is from occupied Sevastopol and worked as a cook. That may well have been the reason why the first reports, in September 2025, claimed that the FSB had arrested “a cook planning to poison Russian soldiers”. As is often the case, such claims are used for propaganda, and then quietly forgotten. That claim was, in all likelihood, based on a single line from a single messenger on social media, which the FSB seem to have suggested was Tsyyk asking her supposed ‘handler’ whether she could “maybe poison that scum?” The person she was writing this to asked her not to do anything rash, and she wrote “it’s [just] emotions.” Tsyryk had been held by the FSB for around a year at that stage, and the FSB would certainly have known then that this could not be stretched out to allege the ‘poisoning plot’ claimed in the propaganda reports. The same is true of the other post, a photo of ships, under which Tsyryk allegedly wrote “this strikes out babies”.
The prosecution claimed that Tsyryk had established contact in 2023 with a representative of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence via an Internet messenger, with the alleged aim being “confidential cooperation.” It was, purportedly, on this person’s instructions that she “taken photographs and gathered information about the places of deployment of Russian military units, technology and military sites and passed these, via a Telegram channel, to a representative of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence to use against the security of the Russian Federation.” If the photos shown on the FSB video circulated to propaganda media are those used for the charges, then the latter were no more plausible than allegations about a ‘poisoning plot’. On some of the photos, Tsyryk is swimming in the sea, with the boats, not unsurprisingly, visible in the background. Such photos were supposed to justify charges of ‘state treason’ under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code.
This was, in short, very little, with the FSB, according to Crimean Tribunal’s sources, having held Tsyryk incommunicado for over a year before they came up with any charges.
She was moved from SIZO-2 to SIZO-1 in October 2025, with it only then that she had any possibility of communication with the outside world. The Memorial Support for Political Prisoners Project believes it likely that she has been in captivity since 6 August 2024 when she was accused, and a month later, convicted of supposed ‘discrediting of the Russian army’ under Article 20.3.3 § 1 of Russia’s code of so-called administrative offences and fined.
Despite the virtual lack of any openness and of any credible ‘evidence’ to back the ‘treason’ charges, Russian ‘judge’ Igor Kozhevnikov from the occupation ‘Sevastopol city court’ found Tsyryk guilty of ‘treason’ and sentenced her to 16 years in a medium-security prison colony, to be followed by a year’s restricted liberty. Kozhevnikov also imposed a steep 200 thousand rouble ‘fine’.
The ruling imposes a sentence significantly worse than those handed down against murderers, rapists, the killers of civilians, etc. Kozhevnikov did so, moreover, in an hour and a half, with this, according to Crimean Process , the amount of time which elapsed between announcement of the ‘first hearing’ and the reading out of the sentence.
There has been a massive increase in Russia’s use of ‘spying’ and ‘treason’ charges against Ukrainians in occupied territory. The ‘trials’ are always hidden, a guilty verdict guaranteed.
