A court in Moscow has sentenced a dual Ukrainian-Russian citizen to 12 years in a penal colony after finding her guilty of committing treason over multiple donations she made to the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), Mediazona reported on Wednesday.
Prosecutors had requested the court hand Tatyana Omelchenko a 14-year prison sentence for some 16 transfers totaling 6,600 hryvnias (€140) she made to the AFU marked as “Medicine for Bakhmut”, and “For a rifle”, among other things.
Omelchenko, a Ukrainian citizen who lives in Kyiv, was detained upon arrival at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in September 2024 while on her way to her brother’s funeral. Omelchenko, 49, was born in Yakutia, in the Russian Far East, but moved with her parents to Ukraine as a child, first to Crimea and, in 2012, to Kyiv, where she has lived ever since.
Since obtaining a Russian passport in 2021, Omelchenko has regularly visited family members in Russia, though following her conviction, prosecutors said that the Interior Ministry would seek to revoke her Russian citizenship.
Though Omelchenko pleaded guilty to the charges against her, she argued that she considered her transfers to the AFU to have been charitable, telling the court: “I got swept up in the general rush to donate money, while under stress from the constant air raid alerts.”