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Photo: Alexandra Astakhova \/ Mediazona<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A court in Rostov-on-Don has sentenced 26-year-old Iryna Navalna to 8 years in prison. Two years ago, she was captured in occupied Mariupol and accused of preparing a terrorist attack during the \u2018referendum\u2019 on joining Russia. Mediazona<\/em> explored what role her surname played in the case, why Iryna did not immediately report torture in detention, how the main witness for the prosecution changed his testimony, and why the court imposed a punishment almost twice less than the prosecutor requested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u0427\u0438\u0442\u0430\u0442\u044c \u043d\u0430 \u0440\u0443\u0441\u0441\u043a\u043e\u043c<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIra has my maiden name. She took her grandfather\u2019s surname, because family was very important to us. My mom passed away in 2015 and her grandad, my dad, lived on. So one day we were sitting and talking and we found out with him that his lineage ends with us girls. I said: \u2018Baby, it would be cool if you gave your children the surname Navalna to continue the family line.\u2019 She says: \u2018So I\u2019ll change my surname, then I\u2019ll get married and give my children a double surname.\u2019 She did that in 2019,\u2019 says Alexandra Skachko, the mother of 26-year-old Iryna Navalna, who was sentenced to eight years in a penal colony in a terrorism case on October 7 by the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don.The Navalny surname<\/p>\n\n\n\n The woman\u2019s family is from Mariupol, a Ukrainian port city where almost half a million people lived before the start of the full-scale invasion. In 2022, it was almost completely destroyed and occupied by Russian troops after a long blockade. More than half of the local residents were forced to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Irina and her mother also became refugees: they left Mariupol on 9 May 2022, a couple of weeks before the city was completely taken over by the Russians. Navalna\u2019s\u00a0paternal\u00a0grandmother Valentina Skachko refused to leave her home. Her stepfather, Vladimir Stolyar, was among the defenders of Azovstal. At the end of May, he left the plant together with the rest of the Ukrainian military and has been a prisoner of war in Russian ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iryna and Alexandra had to leave Mariupol through the occupied territories, which also meant \u2018filtration\u2019: arbitrary questioning and searches at checkpoints, which often resulted in arrests and torture. That\u2019s when Navalna first had problems because of her surname, the same as the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt took her a really long time to get through filtration,\u201d Alexandra says. \u201cThey mocked her, they picked on her surname: \u2018Ah, Navalna! Well, you are, like, Navalny\u2019s bastard daughter.\u2019 They put her up against the wall and put a gun to her head. And there were also elderly people sitting there, whose son-in-law used to help our military. So [the Russians] are really going at them, and there\u2019s my little girl, with a gun to her head, and they are calling their colleagues, saying, \u2018Come on, who wants to see Navalna?\u2019 My daughter was telling me all this, and I said: \u2018God, my baby, who knew that a family name would turn people into monsters like this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After travelling through the self-proclaimed Donetsk People\u2019s Republic, Russia and the Baltic States, Iryna and her mother found themselves back in Ukraine, in its unoccupied part. A few months later, at the end of August, Navalna decided to return to her hometown to visit her grandmother who had stayed behind. As soon as communication with the occupied city was re-established, Alexandra remembers with a sigh, Iryna started to call her grandmother. The elderly woman would cry and say how much she missed her, suggesting: \u201cBaby, come to the sea.\u201d Alexandra herself was totally against her daughter\u2019s trip, but she could not change Iryna\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMom, do you really want to fight over this? We can fight, but I\u2019ll still go. I\u2019m a big girl, I\u2019ve made up my mind. I won\u2019t stay long, just a month or so. I\u2019ll help my grandmother, until they at least get electricity there or something. I\u2019ll get my father\u2019s photos, collect our winter clothes and be on my way back,\u201d Alexandra recalls Irina\u2019s reasoning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At that time, there were already established routes from Ukrainian-controlled territory in the Zaporizhzhia region to occupied Mariupol\u2014and back. Some family acquaintances used them to pick up animals or try to find documents and anything that had survived from the house. This is how Iryna found herself in Mariupol with the help of a carrier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A month in her hometown flew by quickly for Iryna. She lived in a flat with her grandmother, went to the Azov Sea almost every day, and called her mother in the evening. By the end of September, she had already booked a place in the car to return to the Ukrainian-controlled territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the morning of September 27, Iryna Navalna, as usual, rode her bicycle to the coast. \u201cEveryone realised that there might be no other chance to take a look at the sea, so my girl went there to say goodbye to the sea,\u201d says Alexandra. \u201cThese were the days of the \u2018referendum\u2019. Anyone who was passing by, travelling anywhere was stopped and checked. She was stopped, checked. Then, she said, they called somewhere, ran something through the databases, and that’s how they picked her up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iryna\u2019s mother learned that she had been detained from a relative who lives abroad and sent her a message from RIA Novosti, the Russian state news agency, saying that Navalna was suspected of preparing a terrorist attack on the last day of the \u2018referendum\u2019 on DPR\u2019s accession to Russia. According to the news piece, the young woman had already confessed that she\u2019d been recruited by the SSU and had agreed to take an explosive device from a half-destroyed house, plant it near the administration building, and then remotely detonate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI froze, and my head immediately boiled. There was a feeling that this could not be true,\u201d Alexandra Skachko recalls. \u201cI immediately called the volunteers who helped me file my husband as missing. I survived the night, and in the morning I started filing my daughter everywhere, so that she could be included in the register of prisoners of war as soon as possible. There was no time to get discouraged. As you might guess, I went to bed and woke up in tears, but then one pulls themselves together and continues working. Only now it\u2019s not just your husband, but two people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After being detained, Iryna Navalna was taken to the police station. Before the full-scale Russian invasion, the young woman, as she later told the court in Rostov, had been an intern at the same station. Iryna studied IT, but decided to become a patrol officer. She was not accepted for this position, so she started working as a call centre operator in the police.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think that the surname, Navalna, was the initial reason of her detention. The second reason, a hundred per cent, was that she worked in the police, and also that her stepfather is from Azov. These three reasons,\u201d Alexandra says. \u201cAnd they picked on the surname. [Alexei] Navalny was a real threat to the current Russian government, so, naturally, this surname was not just a trigger for all political structures and law enforcers, it was like a red rag to a bull.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iryna was interrogated and \u201cre-enacted\u201d her alleged crime: shown on camera where she had supposedly taken the explosives and where she had planted them. This footage later appeared in Russian propaganda media. The young woman was taken to Donetsk and sent to the pre-trial detention centre. She was charged with attempting to commit a terrorist act and illegal possession of explosives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the investigation, Navalna was going to organise an explosion near an administrative building in occupied Mariupol. At that time, the \u201creferendum\u201d on the accession of the self-proclaimed DPR to Russia was held there. The prosecution alleged that Navalna, \u201cprotesting against the sovereignty of the DPR,\u201d conspired with a representative of the Ukrainian security services and received 25,000 hryvnias from an accomplice in the city of Zaporizhzhia to buy a bicycle \u042dfor the purpose of secretly transporting an improvised explosive device.\u201d After the attack, she was supposed to leave Mariupol and receive another 100,000 hryvnias from the recruiter as a reward, the prosecution claimed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iryna\u2019s grandmother Valentina Skachko told Mediazona how she travelled from Mariupol to Donetsk and tried to get a date with her granddaughter, with no success. After Iryna was placed in detention, they were able to see each other: the woman recalled that the law enforcers twice brought the girl home in handcuffs to \u201cshoot a film.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The NTV<\/em> propaganda channel later produced a whole story<\/a> about Iryna Navalna. In it, the woman recounts her version of how the SSU representative, with \u201cblackmail and money,\u201d talked her into preparing a terrorist attack (she said that otherwise they threatened to harm her mother). At some points she tries to refuse to talk to journalists. All this is interspersed with the host\u2019s sarcastic off-screen comments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prisoner of war Vladimir Stolyar, Navalna\u2019s stepfather, was also shown on NTV. The man, in a prison uniform and with his hands behind his back, is sitting on a chair. He says he doesn\u2019t believe Iryna could have committed crime, and then adds that if it\u2019s true, he \u201cfeels regret\u201d because she\u2019s \u201cruining her life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Irina herself, When Iryna got a chance to see her grandmother, she asked her not to watch the NTV story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cShe was allowed to see Irochka for just a few minutes during the interrogation when she was still in Donetsk. Ira quietly told her: \u2018Grandma, don\u2019t watch this film, I was beaten on the head to say what I say there,\u2019\u201d Alexandra Skachko recounts. \u201cI forced myself to watch it once. There is not a word of truth in it. Irochka tries to talk about her life, about her studies, and they glue her words together, turning them inside out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In January 2023, human rights activist Olga Romanova wrote<\/a> that Iryna was tortured in the Donetsk pre-trial detention centre, referring to the stories of other Ukrainian women who were imprisoned with Navalna and were eventually exchanged. Alexandra Skachko said she knew that \u201ctorture was severe at first\u201d because the security forces \u201cneeded to break her.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy daughter was severely beaten before she was placed with our girls [other Ukrainian PoWs]. For a fortnight, she was in a cell with other women, convicts who were in there for murder. They broke her, roughly speaking. That\u2019s how she got to our girls\u2019 cell. Then there was just bullying of everyone, in general. They were kept on their feet the whole day long. They were not allowed to sit down. They were not allowed to laugh or cry. For any loud noise they were taken out of the cell, into the corridors, and beaten. They were not allowed to go out for walks, they had no proper windows.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iryna spent a year in the Donetsk pre-trial detention centre. In October 2023, the investigation into her case was completed and it was transferred to the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don. The conditions in the Rostov detention centre were better, says Alexandra Skachko.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDuring the time my daughter has been in this hell\u2026 I just cannot understand how people with whom we breathed the same air, lived on the same land, in the Donetsk region, could turn out to be the most cruel of all those who hold our prisoners all over Russia. This is the Donetsk pre-trial detention centre. We have the same way of life, we have the same mentality. Why are you so cruel to your own people? Why is the attitude in Rostov, where Russians are softer with our prisoners, to our captives, so different from Donetsk? I cannot understand.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iryna herself was only able to talk about what really happened to her in Donetsk only after she was transferred to Rostov-on-Don.<\/p>\n\n\n\nArrest<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Donetsk detention centre<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Trial in Rostov-on-Don<\/h2>\n\n\n\n