On August 15, the occupation “court” sentenced Iryna Horobtsova to 10.5 years in prison for allegedly spying.

Iryna Horobtsova is a human rights defender and civic activist from Kherson. She worked for a Ukrainian IT company and actively wrote on social media about the Russian army’s occupation of Kherson. In March 2022, she began helping medical workers as a volunteer driver and supporting residents who had been subjected to violence by the Russian military.

On May 13, 2022, on her birthday, the occupiers abducted Horobtsova from her home in Kherson, where she lived with her parents. She has been illegally detained in the Simferopol Pre-trial Detention Center No. 2 for more than two years.

According to the occupiers, Iryna collected “strategically important data about the occupiers’ units in the Kherson region and passed it to an employee of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine.” This information allegedly “could have been used to launch fire strikes on the locations of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”

It became known that a case of espionage had been opened against Horobtsova only in March 2024, almost two years after her abduction. Emil Kurbedinov, a lawyer, was not allowed to see Horobtsova, and he could see his client only in court.

Today, the court sentenced Horobtsova to 10 years and six months in prison in a general regime penal colony.