In occupied Zaporizhzhia, sending money to Ukraine is punished more harshly than murder.
The Russian occupation "regional court" publishes its own verdicts on Telegram. Coded case-by-case, they show a court built for political control: donating to Ukraine, reporting troop positions or posting online draws a median of 14 years — against 3 for ordinary crime, and 7 even for violent crime.
Every figure below is drawn from the occupation authorities' own public announcements — a record of what they claim and how they punish it, not independently verified fact. See Method & limitations.
The sentencing inversion
Median custodial sentence by offence type, criminal cases with a clearly stated term. Loyalty to Ukraine is punished on a different scale from crime.
A resident who donates money to Ukraine is punished roughly twice as harshly as the median convicted murderer in the same court.
A record of the occupier's own claims
The dataset is built from 1,223 posts on the court's Telegram channel; 815 carry readable text and 300 are criminal verdicts. Each was coded for charge, articles of the Russian Criminal Code, sentence, place and — where stated — citizenship.
This is a documentation exercise, not an endorsement of the charges. "Treason", "espionage" and "sabotage" here are applied to acts that would be lawful civilian behaviour in most of the world: sending money, expressing a view, holding Ukrainian loyalties.
Read every number as a floor
- Source bias. Guilt, coerced confessions and the quality of "evidence" cannot be assessed from a press release.
- A floor, not a census. ~⅓ of posts (408) are image-only and were discounted; political verdicts are often published as decree images, so the true counts are higher.
- Conservative coding. Ambiguous values are excluded from averages; nothing is guessed.
- Initials only. No individuals are named; each case links back to the source post by ID.
Three tiers of justice
The 300 criminal cases fall into three bands of severity. Weapons and explosives sit deliberately between the two: in a war zone these often involve front-line materiel, even when charged as ordinary crimes.
The ordinary-crime docket is unremarkable street crime — theft, traffic, drugs, assault — and is punished mildly; forgery and migration offences are almost never custodial.
The weapons & explosives tier is a grey zone worth reading case by case: only a handful explicitly tie the materiel to the front.
The political tier — treason, espionage, sabotage, "extremism" — is where the system concentrates its severity.
What the "crimes" actually are
Of 53 distinct political verdicts, the charge is almost always a form of support for Ukraine. The largest single category is simply sending money.
Categories overlap; many defendants carry several articles.
Sending money → treason
The single largest category — 23 of 53 cases. Typically small transfers through Ukrainian banking apps. Tellingly, the sentence bears no relation to the amount: a one-off ~1,000-hryvnia transfer and one of over a million roubles both drew 12 years. The punished act is the loyalty, not the sum.
The citizenship trap
12 of 53 defendants had taken a Russian passport — often to keep a pension or stay in their home — which lets the court charge treason rather than espionage. In all, 20 of 53 carry an explicit Ukraine tie in the text (citizen of Ukraine, naturalised, or born in Ukraine).
The cases
Every readable criminal verdict, names removed. Filter by tier, search a town, sort by sentence. Each row links to the source post by ID.
| Post | Date | Town | Tier | Category | RF articles | Sentence | Colony | Citizenship |
|---|
“Post” is the Telegram message ID within the source channel, for verification against the primary source. Sentences shown in years; blank where non-custodial or not stated.
A steady output
Criminal verdicts published per month. The channel opened in December 2024 and settled into a routine cadence through 2026.
How this was built
Posts were parsed from a Telegram Desktop export of the channel. A rule-based script extracted the charge, all cited Criminal-Code articles, sentence length, colony regime, fines, place and citizenship. A case is coded political where the charge cites an article Russia uses against pro-Ukrainian conduct (treason 275, espionage 276, sabotage 281, incitement 280, and related), or where the release plainly describes such conduct.
Sentence statistics use only clearly stated terms; multi-defendant and ambiguous figures are excluded, not estimated. Appeal confirmations are flagged so a single person is not counted twice. The extraction script and full dataset — with a per-case audit trail — accompany this brief.
Known caveats
- 408 image-only posts were discounted from the analysis; counts are minimums.
- Citizenship is recorded only when the court states it — "not stated" ≠ Russian.
- In-absentia trials are under-counted (inconsistent wording).
- The weapons/explosives tier is a grey zone; read case by case.
- All content reflects the occupier's claims at the time of publication.