In brief. Ukrainian journalist Iryna Levchenko was detained on a street in Russian-occupied Melitopol on 6 May 2023, together with her husband. He was released some fifteen months later; she was not. For more than three years she was moved between detention facilities while her family often did not know where she was or what she was formally accused of. On 3 September 2026 a Russian-established court sentenced her to fifteen years. The trial was closed, and the evidence behind the conviction cannot be independently examined.
Melitopol is a city in southern Ukraine, in Zaporizhzhia region. Russian forces captured it in the first days of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 and have held it since. Ukrainian law no longer operates there in practice; the occupying authorities have extended the Russian Criminal Code to the territory. That fact is the starting point for everything that follows in this case.
The case against her
Levchenko was convicted under Article 276 of the Russian Criminal Code — espionage. According to the FSB, she passed information to the Ukrainian side about Russian troops, movements of equipment and Russian-installed authorities in the occupied part of Zaporizhzhia region.
None of this can be independently verified. The proceedings were held behind closed doors; the case file was not available to journalists or independent observers. According to the Institute of Mass Information, citing the outlet RIA-Pivden, even her own lawyer was denied full access to the file.
What is on the record is the timeline. She was detained in May 2023. The substance of the charge became known to her family only in January 2026, when the case reached the Russian-established "Zaporizhzhia Regional Court" — more than two and a half years after she was taken.
Why the sentence fails under the Fourth Geneva Convention
International humanitarian law does not prohibit an occupying power from prosecuting espionage. Article 68 of the Fourth Geneva Convention names it among punishable offences. The problem in Levchenko's case is not the label of the charge. It is where, by which court, and with what procedural guarantees the prosecution was carried out.
Article 64 requires the occupying power to keep the penal laws of the occupied territory in force, allowing it to introduce only such provisions as are essential to its security and to the administration of the territory. The ICRC Commentary is explicit that these exceptions are narrow: occupation authorities may not repeal or suspend local criminal law simply to bring it into line with their own legal conceptions. Russia extended the Russian Criminal Code to Zaporizhzhia region wholesale. The UN Human Rights Office has recorded the application of Russian criminal law in the occupied territories of Ukraine as a violation of international humanitarian law.
From here the case runs into a contradiction with no way out.
If Article 276 is treated as a provision introduced by the occupying power for its own security, then Article 66 applies. It permits the accused to be handed over only to properly constituted, non-political military courts sitting in the occupied country. The ICRC Commentary states that this condition is mandatory: the courts in question are ones whose members hold military status and answer to the military authorities. Levchenko was tried by a Russian-established civilian regional court.
If it is not treated that way, then the occupying power has replaced local criminal law with its own — which Article 64 forbids.
Her transfers raise a separate issue. Article 76 requires that accused persons be detained in the occupied country and, if convicted, serve their sentences there. Simferopol, Donetsk and Mariupol remain Ukrainian territory as a matter of international law. Krasnodar does not: moving her there was the transfer of a protected person from occupied territory into the territory of the occupying power. Article 147 lists unlawful transfer of protected persons among grave breaches of the Convention, and the Rome Statute treats unlawful transfer as a war crime.
Articles 71 to 74 require that an accused person be informed promptly and in writing of the charge, in a language they understand; that the case be tried as rapidly as possible; and that defence counsel have free access. Two and a half years passed between her detention and the case reaching court. Her family, according to her sister, never received the full set of charging documents. Her lawyer was denied full access to the file. Wilfully depriving a protected person of the right to a fair trial is a second grave breach under the same Article 147.
One detail says a great deal about how the prosecution itself is constructed. Article 276 applies exclusively to foreign nationals and stateless persons; for Russian citizens the same conduct is charged as treason under Article 275. By charging Levchenko under Article 276, the Russian prosecution proceeds from the premise that she is a citizen of Ukraine — notwithstanding Russia's declared annexation of the territory where she lived and was seized. In legal terms that is precisely the definition in Article 4 of the Convention: a protected person in the hands of a party to the conflict of which she is not a national. Article 68 requires the court to bear in mind that such a person owes the occupying power no duty of allegiance.
Who she is
Iryna Levchenko was born on 16 September 1961 and entered journalism in 1981. Over four decades she worked at factory newspapers and at the Melitopol district paper Novyi Den, and served as a staff correspondent for regional and national Ukrainian outlets, among them Fakty i Kommentarii.
By February 2022 she had retired. She and her husband chose to stay in Melitopol after Russian forces took the city.
Her sister, Olena Rudenko, has said that even in retirement Iryna kept watching what was happening around her and photographing how the city changed. As Rudenko put it: a journalist is never a former journalist.
Three years of transfers
On 6 May 2023 Iryna and her husband Oleksandr were stopped on a street in Melitopol. Her phone was checked and taken; both were detained. For a time their relatives did not know where they were being held. Oleksandr later managed to pass out a note through a released detainee — this was how the family learned they were alive and were being told the accusation was "terrorism".
The National Union of Journalists of Ukraine reported in 2023, citing information it had received, that the couple were held in severe conditions: effectively without proper food, in a cold room where they slept on a concrete floor, and subjected to physical and psychological pressure. The specific conditions of that early period cannot be independently verified. What Ukrainian and international press-freedom and human rights organisations have documented since is the sustained deprivation of liberty and the absence of any transparent judicial process.
Reporters Without Borders characterises her seizure by Russian forces as an abduction and arbitrary detention.
Oleksandr Levchenko was released in August 2024. On release he was handed a certificate stating that he had officially served twenty-one days of administrative arrest for "violating curfew". His passport, bank cards and the money taken from him were not returned. In fifteen months of detention he saw his wife once, during an exercise period. They were not allowed to speak.
The full sequence of Iryna's transfers cannot be reconstructed. Relatives and journalists' organisations received information about her whereabouts in fragments, often after she had already been moved again. Reports of different facilities record where she was at a given moment; they do not add up to a continuous route.
What is known: after Melitopol she was held in Donetsk, then moved to Mariupol, and from there taken back to Melitopol for investigative procedures. She was later held in the Simferopol pre-trial detention centre in occupied Crimea. In June 2026 she was transferred from Simferopol to Krasnodar — inside Russia. In July she was moved back to Donetsk, and a scheduled hearing was postponed because of the transfer. In September 2026 she gave evidence by video link from a detention facility in Mariupol.
Contact with her remained minimal throughout. According to the European Federation of Journalists, the first letter her family received after a long silence came more than two years after her detention. Short messages were passed on by volunteers. From them her relatives gradually learned about overcrowded cells, cold, poor food and problems with medical care.
The evidence question
The case was built by the FSB, tried by a court established by the same party, behind closed doors, with no independent observers and no access to the file. The closure of the proceedings was a decision of the court, not a matter of circumstance. The result is that the content of the criminal case is determined by the agency that brought it, with no external scrutiny at any stage. There has been no opportunity for anyone outside that process to establish what in the FSB's account is true.
What can be established is different. A Ukrainian citizen was detained on a street in her own city. For three years she was held in facilities her family learned about through smuggled notes. She was moved into Russia in breach of an explicit prohibition in the Convention. She was tried by a civilian court where Article 66 permits only a military one. And she was sentenced to fifteen years.
Not an isolated case
Ukrainian and international organisations maintain lists of journalists held by Russia since the start of the war. The National Union of Journalists of Ukraine reported in mid-2026 that at least 28 Ukrainian journalists were in Russian custody.
After the verdict, the Committee to Protect Journalists demanded her immediate release. CPJ regional director Fiona O'Brien called the fifteen-year sentence an outrageous abuse of the criminal justice system. Reporters Without Borders is likewise calling for the charges to be dropped and for her release.
Over more than three years Iryna Levchenko has had almost no opportunity to tell her own story publicly. Her family, colleagues and human rights defenders have reconstructed it from short letters, occasional messages from detention and reports of each new transfer.
On 3 September 2026 a Russian-established court sentenced her to fifteen years. She turns 65 on 16 September.