Translator from Irkutsk Oblast who tried to reach her partner in Ukraine has sentence increased
Svetlana Savelyeva, a resident of Irkutsk Oblast convicted over her attempt to travel to Ukraine, has had her sentence increased by two months on appeal, SOTAvision reports.
The ruling was handed down by the First Court of Appeal of General Jurisdiction. A panel of three judges, presided over by Viktor Rogov, changed the wording of an aggravating factor from ‘committing the offence in the context of an armed conflict’ to ‘during mobilisation’, which led to the sentence being increased.
In the summer, Svetlana Savelyeva, who is now being held in Pechatniki remand prison in Moscow, was placed in a punishment cell. As a result, the first appeal hearing, scheduled for 15 July, did not go ahead.
Lyudi Baikala (People Of Baikal) had previously reported that ‘during the year and a half she spent in a remand prison in Kursk, the 40-year-old woman’s hair turned grey and her weight fell to a critical level, under 40 kilograms at a height of 168 centimetres’. Svetlana has been diagnosed with cardiovascular and musculoskeletal conditions. In April, her pain medication was confiscated at the remand prison.
On 1 April, Judge Yelena Gutorova of the Kursk Oblast Court sentenced Svetlana Savelyeva to 15 years in a general-regime penal colony, a year longer than the prosecution had requested. She was convicted of attempted high treason (Article 30, Part 3, and Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code) and attempted illegal border crossing (Article 30, Part 3, and Article 322, Part 1). Taxi driver Igor Sandulyak was convicted alongside her and fined 150,000 roubles (≈€1,542) for aiding an attempted illegal border crossing (Article 33, Part 5, Article 30, Part 3, and Article 322, Part 1).
Svetlana Savelyeva lived in Angarsk District, Irkutsk Oblast, and worked as a translator. She met a Ukrainian serviceman named Alexander on Chatroulette, and the two began a romantic relationship. Her attempts to reach Ukraine through legal means came to nothing. In October 2024, after the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ incursion into part of Kursk Oblast, Svetlana decided to try to cross the line of contact. Despite her fiancé’s attempts to talk her out of it, she hired a taxi in Kursk.
On 16 October, she was detained and subjected to ‘carousel’ administrative arrests. On 17 December, she was placed in pre-trial detention in connection with the criminal case. Svetlana Savelyeva’s mother, Lyudmila Afanasyeva, managed to speak with her before her formal detention under the criminal case.
‘I saw Sveta looking very thin, exhausted, with grey hair,’ she said. ‘That’s when she whispered in my ear, on the FSB bus, what FSB officers had done to her. They tortured her with electric shocks, stripped her naked and beat her. Some of them wore balaclavas and did not show their faces. They tortured her and threatened to kill her.’
