Eighteen-month-old daughter of Crimean woman Oleksandra Strilets, convicted of high treason, dies
The eighteen-month-old daughter of Oleksandra Strilets, a Crimean resident convicted of high treason, died the day after being discharged from the hospital where she had remained since birth. Novaya Gazeta reports this, citing the child’s father.
Lera, Oleksandra’s younger daughter, was born on 14 March 2025 with an extremely low birth weight of 530 grams and a length of 30 centimetres. She was placed in intensive care and diagnosed with bronchopulmonary dysplasia. In mid-April, she was intubated because she was unable to breathe on her own.
Oleksandra Strilets was under a written undertaking not to leave her place of residence while facing charges of high treason (Article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code). Her mother, Viktoriia Strilets, was a co-defendant in the case. On 5 August 2025, Oleksandra and Viktoriia Strilets were each sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment and taken into custody in the courtroom. Danil Zemlyukov, a judge of the Sevastopol City Court, refused to defer the execution of Oleksandra’s sentence until her daughters turned 14, citing the fact that the children had a father. A judge of the Third Court of Appeal of General Jurisdiction, Yelena Udod, upheld Oleksandra and Viktoriia’s sentences on 21 January.
After her mother’s arrest, Lera underwent several operations, and her condition remained unstable. She had a tracheostomy fitted and was fed through a tube.
‘He spent a year preparing for the discharge,’ Novaya Gazeta writes of the child’s father, ‘turning the nursery into a fully equipped room for a child receiving palliative care. A ventilator, an oxygen concentrator, a monitor… Maksim learned to operate the specialised medical equipment.’
▪️ The Russian prosecutor’s office in occupied Sevastopol stated that Oleksandra ‘decided, in exchange for payment, to engage in confidential cooperation with representatives of Ukraine against the security of the Russian Federation, and recruited her mother to carry out this activity.’ According to the prosecution, ‘in September 2023, Oleksandra Strilets passed on photographs taken by her mother’ of Russian military facilities to a channel linked to HUR, Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence.
▪️ Oleksandra Strilets was born in Sevastopol in 2000. After 2014, she lived with her father in mainland Ukraine. In 2017, she travelled to Sevastopol to visit her mother, Viktoriia. When doctors diagnosed Viktoriia with multiple sclerosis, Oleksandra stayed to care for her and obtained a Russian passport. In 2020, she gave birth to her elder daughter, Solomiya, who was also born prematurely and underweight. Oleksandra wrote that after the birth, she and the baby were both ‘on the verge of death’.
