cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/46874450
Russia’s supreme court has reduced by only one year the 14-year sentence passed against Oksana Hladkykh, a mother of four abducted from her home in occupied Zaporizhzhia oblast in November 2023. This was presumably a cassation appeal, as the original sentence, passed on 7 June 2024 by the occupation ‘Zaporizhzhia regional court’, had been upheld on 7 November 2024 by the first court of appeal in Moscow. All of Russia’s ‘treason trials’, including the supreme court hearing which seems to have been at the end of October 2025, are behind closed doors with this one of the reasons why information is scant and often delayed. Although the supreme court ‘judges’ removed a part of the charge (the accusation of providing “other help to a foreign country”) and reduced the sentence from 14 to 13 years, they chose to see no reason to overturn a manifestly wrongful conviction on ‘treason’ charges under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code.
The reasons for dismissing the charges and releasing the 49-year-old Ukrainian could not have been clearer and were set out by the authoritative Memorial Support for Political Prisoners Project when it declared Oksana Hladkykh a political prisoner in August 2025. Hladkykh had never concealed her opposition to the Russian invaders and had openly expressed her views on social media, with this clearly the reason for her denunciation on a scurrilous Telegram channel aimed at hunting out those with a strong pro-Ukrainian position, as well as for her ‘arrest’ / abduction in late November 2023). Neighbours from Dobrivka have suggested to RIA-South that Hladkykh’s former husband, who supported the Russians, could have denounced her to curry favour with the invaders. It is also possible that Hladkykh had corresponded with somebody who claimed to be from HUR, and that this was, in fact, an FSB setup.
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In writing about the cassation appeal ruling on 31 January 2026, RIA South said that Hladkykh’s persecution had become a symbol of how Ukrainians are punished on occupied territory for remaining true to Ukraine. Her neighbours from Dobrivka are convinced that she was seized because of her civic stand and because she was not afraid to speak the truth.
“Oksana was principled. From the outset, she opposed the invaders and was open in calling things by their proper name. She was not afraid to tell the invaders to their face what she thought of them. Her abduction was a warning to us all – so that we would be afraid to say a word against Russia.”
“Her only guilt is in being a Ukrainian and in the fact that she did not betray her country. That’s enough for them to imprison a person."
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The Russians came for Hladkykh on 24 November 2023. The children were not allowed inside, from where they heard screams. Their mother was taken away, with the Russians initially claiming that this was for four days. This was a brutal lie and Oksana Hladkykh was sentenced, for her patriotism and unwillingness to be cowered by the invaders, to a term of imprisonment higher than the sentences Russia regularly uses against murderers and other real criminals.