Moscow Court Jails Journalist Daria Shipacheva 12 Years for Treason
The science outlet T-Invariant, citing five sources close to Shipacheva, who was born in Ukraine, reported that the Moscow City Court’s guilty verdict stems from a wire transfer she made to a Ukrainian family member.
“As far as we know, investigators took a transfer she made to a civilian family member, reinterpreted its purpose and built the entire treason charge around it,” an unidentified acquaintance of the journalist told T-Invariant.
Shipacheva was arrested in April 2025 and transferred to a detention facility in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don. According to T-Invariant, she was recently transferred to Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo prison.
Her trial, which Mediazona said lasted just 90 minutes, took place behind closed doors.
“But recently, she asked us to invite reporters to the sentencing hearing,” the friend was quoted as saying.
The independent news outlet Sotavision published a video showing Shipacheva’s shocked reaction to the judge’s verdict on Wednesday.
Shipacheva’s defense team had asked the judge to give her a lighter sentence since she had cooperated with law enforcement officials and pleaded guilty.
Between 2019 and 2025, Shipacheva worked as a freelance medical journalist for Forbes Russia, in addition to outlets like RBC, Takie Dela and others.
Before her arrest, T-Invariant reported that Shipacheva was subjected to online harassment by members of the banned ultra-nationalist group “Male State” over her feminist views.
Russian courts convicted a record 312 people on charges of treason, espionage and illegal cooperation with a foreign state in the first half of 2026, according to the exiled news outlet Vyorstka.
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