Treason mill. Science journalist Darya Shipacheva sentenced to 12 years in a case whose charges were never made public

Prosecutors had asked for the same term. The defense asked the court to take into account that Shipacheva had pleaded guilty and cooperated with investigators. The hearing lasted an hour and a half.

What exactly Shipacheva was accused of remains unclear, as the trial was held behind closed doors. The judge also ordered the confiscation of 1,558,000 rubles (about $19,600), a measure courts typically apply in criminal cases involving the financing of criminal activity.

A friend of Shipacheva’s had mentioned a money transfer in conversation with Mediazona, but said she did not know “whether it was a transfer to the [Ukrainian] army.”

Shipacheva was detained on April 23, 2025 at her Moscow apartment. “In the night she wrote that someone had started banging on her door,” her friend said. Neighbors later told her friends that “a crowd of riot police burst in” on Shipacheva, after which she stopped answering messages.

According to the friend, Shipacheva was taken to Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, near the border with Ukraine, where a court ordered her held in pre-trial detention. She agreed to a deal with investigators after being formally charged, the friend said. In her letters from the detention center, Shipacheva never wrote about the substance of the case.

Shipacheva worked as a science and medical journalist and contributed to a range of outlets, among them RBC, Lenta.ru, Takie Dela, Forbes, Wonderzine and Reminder.

Sergei Podoprigorov is the judge who sanctioned the detention of Hermitage Capital auditor Sergei Magnitsky, who died in custody in 2009, and was among the first officials placed on the US Magnitsky list. In 2023, despite this obvious connection, he refused to recuse himself and presided over the treason trial of politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who lobbied for that same Magnitsky Act; Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years.

Shipacheva’s verdict came on a day of treason rulings. Today, a 66-year-old man from annexed Sevastopol, Alexander Glukhoedov, was sentenced to 18 years in a maximum security prison over the alleged surveillance of military vehicles and Russian warships. Investigators alleged that Ukrainian intelligence recruited him in December 2022 while he was in the Volyn region and that he then returned to Sevastopol to gather information on the deployment of Black Sea Fleet vessels.

At the Moscow City Court the same day, 22-year-old Alexander Karpovets, a student at a Ukrainian university, set out the accusations against him as judges once again extended his detention. Karpovets said the “only piece of evidence” in the case is his mobile phone, which “was seized back on July 7 [2025], that is, practically two months before the criminal case was opened.”

Also at the Moscow City Court, 35-year-old Maxim Kravchuk, accused of treason over photographs sent to a relative “in the near abroad,” had his detention upheld. His lawyer stressed that the law does not forbid communicating with relatives; she brought to court the death certificate of Kravchuk’s grandfather, whose funeral he traveled to in 2019. Ostorozhno, Novosti reported that he worked as an aerodynamics specialist at TsNIIMash, the Moscow research institute subordinate to Roscosmos.

Prosecutions under the treason and espionage charges have grown steeply since the start of the full-scale war. Over the past few days, a student in Ryazan was sentenced to 15 years in a case in which he “was convinced” he had been communicating with a representative of Ukraine; a Moscow resident was jailed pending trial on treason charges after being detained over a Ukrainian trident tattoo and subjected to repeated “carousel” arrests; and a man in Khabarovsk in the Far East was sent to pre-trial detention on accusations of ties to New Zealand’s intelligence services.