Former journalist from Melitopol sentenced to 15 years on espionage charges

Iryna Levchenko, a 64-year-old former journalist from Melitopol, has been sentenced to 15 years in a general-regime penal colony on espionage charges (Article 276 of the Russian Criminal Code).

‘L., born in 1961, a former journalist based in Melitopol with one of the Ukrainian media outlets, did not leave Zaporizhzhia Oblast after the start of the special military operation and did not renounce her Ukrainian citizenship,’ begins a press release issued by the occupation ‘Zaporizhzhia Oblast Court’. According to the prosecution, in February 2023 Iryna Levchenko passed to the Ukrainian intelligence services ‘information about Russian state ministries and agencies, including security agencies, together with their addresses and lists of employees’.

Iryna Levchenko worked as a journalist for around 40 years, writing, as she herself put it, ‘for city, oblast and nationwide Ukrainian outlets’. Among the outlets she worked for were the newspaper Telenedelya, Fakty ta Komentari and the Telegraf news website. She retired after the occupation of Melitopol.

On 6 May 2023, Iryna Levchenko and her husband, Oleksandr Levchenko, disappeared. They are believed to have been detained in the street by Russian security forces. Oleksandr was released in September 2024 after being given a document stating that he had been detained for 21 days for violating curfew.

According to our information, Iryna Levchenko was held unofficially in a ‘pit’ for 14 months. Her detention was only formally registered in July 2024. She has said that masked men tortured her with electric shocks. Her lawyer told her that the authorities had investigated her allegations of torture but concluded that they could not be substantiated. She says she was not even questioned about what she knew.

Iryna Levchenko has been held at various times in remand prisons in Donetsk, Simferopol and Krasnodar. She is currently being held in a remand prison in Mariupol.