Two residents of occupied territories sentenced to more than 10 years each for alleged cooperation with Ukrainian intelligence

In occupied Donetsk, 19-year-old Volnovakha resident Yuliia Buievets was sentenced to 12 years in a general-regime penal colony on a charge of high treason (Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code), TASS reported.

The FSB announced Buievets’s detention in March, although it has since emerged that she was in fact detained in January. Officers came to the Youth Centre in Volnovakha, where they detained her before taking her to her home for a search. In a video statement, she said: ‘I was contacted by a representative of the Ukrainian security services. He instructed me to send him the coordinates of military personnel, information about local residents and the addresses of government buildings. I provided him with this information, which I deeply regret and repent.’

Yuliia Buievets is being held in the SIZO-1 remand prison in Donetsk.

In the occupied part of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Serhii Pustovyi, a resident of the village of Blahovishchenka born in 1969, was sentenced to 11 years in a high-security penal colony on an espionage charge (Article 276 of the Russian Criminal Code). According to the prosecution, between May and November 2022 he passed information about the deployment and movements of Russian troops to a close relative serving in the Ukrainian army.

The occupation-installed ‘Zaporizhzhia Regional Court’ claimed that he ‘remained a supporter of pro-Ukrainian ideology after the start of the special military operation’. Judging by his social media profiles, however, he can hardly be described as a ‘supporter of pro-Ukrainian ideology’.