A court in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region has sentenced a Ukrainian woman to 10.5 years in prison for “espionage”, Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office announced on Wednesday.
Irina Gorobtsova, who was abducted by the Russian security services after helping local residents during the Russian occupation of Kherson, was found guilty of “collecting strategically important data on Russian Armed Forces units” in the Kherson region between February 2022 and March 2023 and passing it to the Ukrainian military’s Main Directorate of Intelligence.
The information Gorobtsova allegedly gave to the Ukrainian army “could have been used to carry out strikes on Russian Armed Forces locations”, it said.
Following the Russian military’s capture of the city of Kherson in March 2022, Gorobtsova protested against the Russian occupation and wrote pro-Ukrainian posts on social media, as well as supplying vulnerable locals with food and medicine.
After her abduction by Russian forces in May 2022, Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets alleged that Gorobtsova had confessed to providing Russian military positions to the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) under duress.
Gorobtsova was held in a detention facility in Russian-annexed Crimea for two years where she was denied contact with her family and lawyer, before the Russian authorities opened a criminal case against her in April.
Approximately a quarter of the Kherson region including the regional capital Kherson on the right bank of the Dnipro River was liberated by the AFU in November 2022, just two months after Vladimir Putin had declared it would be part of Russia “forever” following Russia’s illegal annexation of four regions of eastern Ukraine in September 2022. The rest of the Kherson region on the left bank of the Dnipro remains under Russian control.