Horror in My Home. Story of a Ukrainian woman Kateryna Korovina, sentenced to 10 years in Russia for donating $12 to Ukrainian causes

A Dictated Confession

On the morning of March 19, 2024, while heading to a pharmacy, Kateryna Korovina was approached by two plainclothes men. One introduced himself as a police officer and demanded that she come with them, claiming she resembled a woman who had lost her wallet. Confused, she followed them. Korovina later recalled that they held her by the arms the entire way—likely to prevent her from fleeing.

Once she was inside their car, a third officer joined them. He was a 29-year-old FSB captain named Maksim, who informed her that she was being detained on suspicion of espionage. He took her unlocked phone and began scrolling through her photos. One image particularly caught his attention—it showed Russian military equipment.

Korovina was kept in the car for several hours as officers interrogated her in detail: Did she have a “handler”? Did she know any pro-Ukrainian activists? Later, another FSB officer, Andrei, joined in. He warned her: if she didn’t cooperate willingly, he would have to take a “different approach.”

She was then taken to a police station, where the questioning continued—this time about her views on the war and the occupation.

“Andrei would periodically burst into the room, very aggressive, accusing me of being the reason the war was still going on,” she later wrote from pre-trial detention. “I saw it as a psychological attack, designed to throw me off and stop me from thinking clearly.”

There, in the police station, she handed over the password to her Ukrainian bank account with Oschadbank. After reviewing her transaction history, Maksim pointed to two recent payments and declared that the money had been used to finance Right Sector, the Aidar battalion, and the Azov brigade.

For hours, Korovina says, the FSB officer hammered home the idea that she had funded “terrorists and extremists.” According to his logic, any money sent to Ukraine ultimately supported the country’s armed forces, which included Azov and Right Sector. She tried to explain that she didn’t understand the structure of Ukraine’s military and that her small donations were for humanitarian aid—to help civilians. The counterintelligence officer was unmoved.

“Maksim told me to stop playing dumb and sign the protocol,” she later recalled.

Under pressure, she did. She signed a document admitting she had sent several hundred hryvnias—about $12—to support the Ukrainian army.

That confession, along with her bank statements, formed the basis of the criminal case against her. She was charged with financing terrorism and extremism. Later in court, Korovina said she had only pleaded guilty out of fear of torture. Maksim had initially accused her of espionage. Although an analysis of her phone confirmed that she had never sent the photo of Russian military equipment to anyone, she was terrified.

Before the ordeal ended, Korovina said, officers recorded a video in which she confessed to supporting Azov and Right Sector. She struggled to memorise the dictated statement and eventually read it from a piece of paper held in front of her by one of the agents.

“And What If China Comes for Us Tomorrow?”

Kateryna Korovina is 28 years old. She was born and raised in the village of Pishchane, on the outskirts of Starobilsk in the Luhansk region. The town was occupied by Russian forces in early March 2022. Local residents were hostile to the arrival of the Russian army—pro-Ukrainian protests took place, people blocked military vehicles on the roads, and flags of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic were set on fire.

After Russia annexed Luhansk region, Korovina refused to take Russian citizenship. Addressing the court, she explained her reasoning in an impassioned final statement:

“I don’t know of any other place in the world where you can wake up one day and suddenly be a foreigner in your own home, where you were born and raised. It’s surreal, truly! What was I supposed to do? Take the passport of a country that isn’t mine? And what if China comes for us tomorrow—should I take a Chinese passport too? What am I, 007? Why am I being forced to accept a foreign passport and pretend that nothing has happened?”

Korovina lived with her parents in a house. According to her mother, Valentyna, she had not been working recently but wrote articles and earned small fees for them. Her mother did not know where she was published.

She struggled to cope with the Russian invasion and occupation. The war shattered her family—she told the court that for the past two and a half years, she had heard nothing from her sister, niece, nephew, or uncle.

“What am I supposed to feel? On one side, I have relatives in Russia whom I love and don’t want to lose contact with. On the other, I have relatives in Ukraine, who I worry about every day, wondering if they’re still alive when they go silent for too long. And what do I see before me? Ruined cities—places I remember as whole, beautiful, and thriving.”

When the FSB examined her phone, they found she was subscribed to Ukrainian Telegram channels, including ✙MAGNAT✙, Starobilsk Life, “Ukrainian Offensive,” and “What’s on the Frontline?”, a private channel. According to Russian investigators, two of these were linked to Azov fighters and Right Sector members, who used them to raise funds. These crowdfunding campaigns were supposedly for drones and military equipment.

During the investigation, Korovina admitted she had donated to military supplies but later retracted this in court, insisting she had only contributed to humanitarian efforts—such as buying heaters for civilians.

“I was easy to pressure—I’m impressionable, sensitive, anxious, not entirely stable mentally,” she told the judge in her final statement. “How can anyone stay normal in a place where sirens wail daily, shelling never stops, planes and helicopters fly overhead, and machine-gun fire rings out at night?”

In any case, the amounts she had donated were tiny—between 30 and 60 hryvnias per transaction. Her largest single donation was just 242.74 rubles.

“A Fan of Azov and Right Sector”

Her ordeal did not end with the police station. That same day, FSB officers took her home to conduct a search. On the way, one of the agents lectured her about how Ukraine “had never existed as a real country” and how “Ukrainians aren’t a nation.”

At her house, they were aggressive with her brother, Kostiantyn Dyachenko. “They detained him the rough way,” Korovina later said. “They threatened to shoot him for any ‘wrong move’.”

Though Dyachenko remained only a witness in her case, she remembered officers hinting that if she refused to cooperate, they would go after him too.

The FSB placed her under a travel ban, but three days later, Maksim returned with her seized phone, asking her to formally allow them to check her messages. She later realised, from Google security alerts, that they had already accessed her accounts. During this visit, he took screenshots of several transactions made between January and March 2024 via Oschadbank.

For the next two months, Korovina was repeatedly summoned to meet with FSB agents. Sometimes, they wanted to “clarify” details; other times, they simply checked whether she was still in town.

Then, at 7 a.m. on June 10, armed officers in camouflage and masks arrived at her home. Among them was a woman filming the scene on her phone. This footage later appeared in an FSB propaganda video, portraying Korovina as an exposed supporter of Azov and Right Sector. The video was edited to include old footage from her initial detention, making it seem as if she had changed clothes during the arrest.

Korovina recalled that this time, officers pointed their rifles directly at her, ordering her to hold up her Ukrainian passport and state on camera that she had “sponsored terrorists and extremists.”

Korovina spent the next month in a temporary detention centre. She was taken for psychological and psychiatric evaluations and regularly brought to the investigator’s office to sign new protocols. On July 5, she was officially remanded in custody.

The case against her rested on nine transactions made via Oschadbank between January and March 2024, totalling 470 Ukrainian hryvnias—approximately 1,127 Russian rubles (just over $12 at the time). These payments had been sent to Monobank accounts in Ukraine, and among the listed recipients was a person named Serhii Sternenko. This name is quite well known, as this is the former leader of the Odesa branch of Right Sector, who he has since become a prominent volunteer fundraiser for the Ukrainian military. The FSB argued that Korovina must have known where her money was going.

However, her lawyer told Mediazona that investigators never confirmed the actual identities of the recipients.

“They could have listed any organisation and claimed it had an account there,” he said. “By this logic, they could accuse anyone of financing terrorism just for sending money to Ukraine. What mattered to them was that the transfers were made through Oschadbank, which operates in Ukraine. That alone was enough [for an indictment].”

In court, Korovina pleaded not guilty, insisting she had only donated to humanitarian causes, not the military.

One of her passions was poetry. Usually, she wrote in Ukrainian, but for the trial, she made an exception. She ended her final statement with a poem in Russian titled “Horror in My Home”.

No more shall I feel my home again,
Nor hear the wind’s hum or the birds’ lullaby,
For terror, once a distant dream,
Has drawn too near to bow us all down.

On February 17, Judge Alexander Generalov of the Southern District Military Court sentenced Korovina to 10 years in a penal colony.

For now, she remains in Pretrial Detention Centre No. 1 in Rostov-on-Don, in Cell 105. She is held separately from Russian prisoners, alongside other Ukrainian women charged with terrorism and extremism.

On February 24—the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion—Korovina sent a letter from detention:

“Today is a particularly sad day for all of us. But this morning, I was dancing and making up songs on the spot, trying to cheer up the girls here. Ozzy Osbourne once said: ‘I’d jump out of a window just to make a sad person laugh.’ I’m the same. And with that attitude, how could they ever defeat us all? They simply can’t!”

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev