Russian Activists Sentenced To 22 Years In Prison For Helping Ukrainians Escape

Ukrainian military illustration. (Wikimedia Commons/Ministry of Defense of Ukraine)

JAKARTA - A Russian activist who helped gather humanitarian aid for Ukraine and helped Ukrainians escape from the war zone was sentenced to 22 years in prison on Friday by a Moscow military court, the state news agency RIA reported.

Nadezhda Rossinskaya, also known as Nadin Geisler, runs a group called the "Beautiful Army", which says it has helped some 25,000 people in Russia-controlled Ukrainian territory by 2022-23, according to a report last year in The Moscow Times.

Authorities arrested Geisler in February 2024, charged him with treason and assisting terrorist activities over a post he said he made on Instagram calling for donations to Ukraine's Azov Battalion.

Geisler denied any wrongdoing. His lawyer said he was not the author of the post, according to a transcript of the trial compiled by Mediazone, a Russian independent media.

Prosecutors were sentenced to 27 years in prison for Geisler, who was in his late 20s. Mediazone reported that Geisler had asked the court to imprison him for 27 years and one day, so his prison sentence could exceed Darya Trepova's sentence, a Russian woman jailed for sending a bomb that killed a pro-war blogger in 2023.

Trepova's sentence, handed down last year, is the longest sentence given to any woman in modern Russian history.

It is known that prosecutions for terrorism, espionage, and cooperation with foreign countries have increased sharply in Russia since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine more than three years ago. Pervy Otdel, Russia's lawyer association, said 359 people were convicted of the crime in 2024.