Vasilisa Shishkina, a journalist for the regional outlet Number One, was sentenced to 12 years in a general-regime penal colony by the Supreme Court of Buryatia, her lawyer Vasily Dubkov said, as reported by Mediazona.
The verdict was handed down on May 21. On August 6, the Fifth Appellate Court of General Jurisdiction in Novosibirsk reviewed appeals and amended the sentence only regarding the calculation of time served in pre-trial detention: initially one day in custody counted as one and a half days in the colony, but the appellate court ruled it should count one-for-one. The length of the sentence was unchanged.
Shishkina was taken into custody on July 17, 2025, and is currently held in pre-trial detention center No. 1 in Novosibirsk. The specific charges against her are unknown: the case was heard in a closed court session due to state secrecy, the lawyer said.
Shishkina worked as an editor at Number One in Buryatia. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she wrote about violations of the rights of mobilized soldiers from Buryatia.