Prosecutors on July 28 asked the Moscow City Court to sentence journalist Daria Shipachyova to 12 years in a penal colony on charges of high treason, according to a Mediazona correspondent who attended the closed-door hearing. The session lasted just 1.5 hours and the details of the accusation were not disclosed.
Shipachyova's defense asked the court to take into account her guilty plea and cooperation with the investigation, Mediazona reported.
The journalist's arrest and detention had not been publicly reported before. Shipachyova was detained on April 23, 2025, and taken to a pretrial detention center in Rostov-on-Don, where she spent more than a year, before being transferred to Moscow's Lefortovo prison, the outlet T-invariant wrote, citing sources close to Shipachyova.
According to T-invariant's sources, the criminal case was triggered by a money transfer to a civilian in Ukraine. “Daria was born in Ukraine, she has many relatives there. One of her transfers, which she made to a certain civilian, investigators interpreted differently and the accusation is built around that,” an acquaintance of Shipachyova told the outlet. Another source clarified that the transfer was to a relative.
Friends and former classmates told T-invariant that before her arrest, Shipachyova had received threats from activists of the misogynistic movement “Male State” (banned in Russia as extremist). “One of the last messages was: 'We are digging under you, soon they will come for you,'” one acquaintance said. After that, Shipachyova cleaned up her public information, changed passwords, and made her accounts private.
Shipachyova, 35, worked as a science and medical journalist, contributing to Forbes, RBC, Lenta.ru, Takie Dela, and other outlets, and was a master's student at ITMO University in the Health Sciences program. She is also known as a feminist activist.
The court is scheduled to deliver the verdict on July 29.