Russia’s occupation ‘Luhansk people’s republic high court’ has sentenced 62-year-old Serhiy Iliechko from Kadiivka (rus. Stakhanov) to over 12 years’ maximum-security imprisonment on truly bizarre and lawless charges. The only moderately specific charges against Iliechko pertain to alleged activities back in 2017 and 2018. This was years before Russia dropped all pretence and openly occupied the territory, claiming it to be ‘Russian’. It was also four or five years before Iliechko took the Russian citizenship used to charge him with ‘treason’.
Serhiy Iliechko (b. 1963) has clearly been imprisoned since some time in 2024, although the first acknowledgement of this was in July 2026. The TASS report then suggested that Iliechko and two other Ukrainians had only just been “detained”. It is unclear when formal charges were laid, with this likely to be when he was officially remanded in custody. He could, in short, have been held incommunicado, without any official status, for up to two years, with this period typically used to extract ‘confessions’ through torture or other forms of duress. The videoed ‘confession’ which TASS posted on 23 July 2026 is very likely to have been shot in 2024. This refers to the sauna which later became part of the charges but also makes a rather garbled statement about confirming ‘sites’ in Stakhanov, Brianka and Kirovsk supposedly later subjected to strikes. The latter claim is not in the indictment reported on 21 September.
The ‘conviction’ on ‘treason’ charges, under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code, was reported on 21 September 2026 by both the occupation ‘LPR high court’ and by the occupation prosecutor, with nothing to indicate whether there were any hearings or merely the announcement of sentence. There are slight differences between the two reports, but both claim that Iliechko began working for Ukraine’s Security Service [SBU] and Military Intelligence in 2018, supposedly using the pseudonym ‘Halyna’. The ‘court’ claims that he carried out “visual surveillance” of ‘LPR ministry of state security’ officials and their families” from May through December 2018. He also purportedly built a sauna with listening devices in it. On the videoed ‘confession’, he says that this was supposed to be for himself, but the Ukrainian Security Service liked the idea of using it to get information from Russian occupation ‘enforcement officers’. In the version posted by the ‘court’, the sauna was planned for renting out to Russian military and fighters from ‘LPR’. Iliechko received Russian citizenship in 2023 (around the time when Russia was making it next to impossible to live on occupied territory without a Russian passport). The ‘court’ asserts rather vaguely that “he continued his activities in the interests of SBU and Military Intelligence”, with these supposedly “criminal activities” curtailed with his seizure at some point in 2024. That vagueness clashes with the very definite dates given for specific claims about surveillance.
This is by no means the first time that Russia has totally flouted the fundamental principle that the law is not retroactive. In this case, a person who only received Russian citizenship in 2023 has received a very long sentence for alleged activities at least five years earlier. The Memorial Support for Political Prisoners Project points out that this was supposedly made possible by a law passed in 2023 which claimed that “crimes against the interests of LPR, committed before 30 September 2022” were to be considered crimes against the interests of Russia, with so-called ‘LPR citizens’ treated as Russian citizens.
It is seriously questionable whether an inalienable principle of legal systems can be thus upended by a politically motivated ‘law’ passed by the ‘parliament’ of an aggressor state, however that is the claim used here.
Serhiy Iliechko, who is already or will soon turn 63, was sentenced to 12 years and two months in a maximum-security prison colony, with a subsequent one year of restricted liberty.
