A small court in Russian‑occupied Crimea is flooded with “discrediting the army” cases

The Armiansk City Court processed 249 such cases between January 2024 and January 2025, Mediazona has discovered in the court records database. This compares with just five cases in 2022 and 31 in 2023. A sharp increase occurred towards the end of 2024, with 53 hearings in November and 26 in December.

Armiansk is a small town in northern Crimea, and the border crossing nearby was a key route between Russia and Ukraine before the 2022 invasion.

In January 2024, the Russian authorities allowed travel through the crossing to and from the occupied parts of the Kherson region–the Ukrainian land behind that border crossing has been occupied since 2022. Still, the crossing is permitted with a Russian internal passport or “documents provided for by international treaties between Russia and other countries.”

Ukrainians attempting to leave the occupied part of the Kherson region for Crimea faced a “filtration” process. “Media Initiative for Human Rights” recounted the case of Yevgeny, a 24-year-old from the Kherson region. After the Russian occupation, he travelled to Crimea hoping to reach Europe. At the Armiansk crossing, Russian security forces detained him, recovered deleted files from his phone, and imprisoned him in a Simferopol detention centre, where he was tortured for six months.

Mediazona examined publicly available rulings from the Armiansk City Court. All relate to social media posts—on Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram—about the war and Russian military actions. While all defendants are officially listed as Russian citizens, random checks against leaked databases suggest they are originally from Ukraine, mostly the Kherson region.

The rulings are strikingly similar. The judge quotes the offending post, states the defendant was duly notified (usually by text message), and imposes a 30,000-rouble (about $300) fine. We found only a handful of cases where the defendant attended the hearing, but this made no difference—same fine, same amount. Many rulings note the offence was “detected during monitoring of the defendant’s mobile phone”—likely during the “filtration” process.