Iryna Levchenko

Iryna Levchenko is a Ukrainian journalist, born on 16 September 1961. She has worked in journalism since 1981: at factory in-house newspapers and at the Melitopol district newspaper Novyi Den, and as a staff correspondent for regional and national Ukrainian outlets, including Fakty i Kommentarii. By the start of the full-scale invasion she had retired, and she stayed in Melitopol after Russian forces captured the city in February 2022.

On 6 May 2023, Levchenko and her husband Oleksandr were detained in the street in Melitopol, shortly after she had been photographing the city. Her husband was released in August 2024; Iryna was kept in custody. For more than three years she was moved between places of detention: Melitopol, Mariupol, Simferopol pre-trial detention centre No. 1, Krasnodar (June 2026), Donetsk (July-August 2026), and Mariupol again (September 2026). This sequence has been pieced together from fragmentary information that her relatives received only after each transfer had already happened; the full order of her transfers cannot be established.

The substance of the charges remained unknown until January 2026, when the case reached the Russian-established "Zaporizhzhia Regional Court" under Article 276 of the Russian Criminal Code ("espionage"). The trial was held behind closed doors; even her lawyer was not given full access to the case file.

According to Mediazona, in September 2026, on the eve of the verdict against Gennady and Olha Kapralov, Levchenko testified via video link from a pre-trial detention centre in Mariupol before the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don. She fully corroborated the Kapralovs’ testimony about torture in a secret prison in Melitopol and recounted that in 2023 she had met another Ukrainian journalist there, Viktoria Roshchyna, who later died in Russian captivity.

On 3 September 2026, the court sentenced Iryna Levchenko to 15 years in prison; the court announced the sentence on 4 September. The Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders are calling for her immediate release; RSF describes her detention as an abduction.