Homeless man sentenced to 15 years for espionage in Mykolaiv

In Mykolaiv, a man was sentenced to prison for passing photos of important objects and military locations in the city to the Nazis. After his release from prison, he began to collaborate with the enemy.

This is evidenced by the verdict of the Shevchenkivskyi District Court of Kyiv.

According to the investigation, the man was in a penal colony in Kherson at the time of the full-scale invasion. After his release, he moved to Mykolaiv and temporarily settled in a reintegration center for the homeless, where he applied for social assistance. There, in January 2023, he contacted accounts associated with representatives of the Russian Federation via telegram and agreed to send photos and videos of critical infrastructure and locations of the Ukrainian military in exchange for a monetary reward. For his first assignments, he received several transfers to his bank card.

He completed the first task, a video recording of a street and a private building, on the same day and received 4,000 UAH. The next day, on January 11, he filmed a service station with military vehicles, sent the footage and received 3,969 hryvnias. On January 12, he was filming areas near important facilities, including the Mykolaiv Regional Prosecutor's Office, and was detained while performing the task.

The defendant pleaded not guilty and claimed that the phone did not belong to him, that he had not received any assignments from the Russian Federation and had not filmed the location of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The court recognized this testimony as an attempt to create a false picture and confirmed that the materials and correspondence provided proved his guilt.

Taking into account the gravity of the crime, the court sentenced him to 15 years in prison and confiscation of all his property.

Recently, two employees of a defense plant, a laboratory assistant and a mechanic, were detained in Mykolaiv region, who, according to investigators, had been collaborating with Russian military intelligence. Although they were acting separately, their goal was the same: to pass on the geolocation of workshops and data on the facility's security system to the occupiers.

Анна Бальчінос