Kherson regional council deputy sentenced for cooperation with occupiers

A court has found 58-year-old Svitlana Mezherytska, a member of the Kherson Regional Council and former head of the Kherson City Council's health department, guilty of collaboration. She was detained in March 2024.

This was reported by the Center for Investigative Journalism.

According to the investigation, in the summer of 2022, Mezherytska headed the health department of the occupation administration of Kherson, working under a pseudonym. According to the SBU, she helped the Russians organize military hospitals in the seized hospitals.

In court, the woman explained that she initially refused to head the department under the Russian flag, but informed the staff of her unit about the offer. After the abduction of the city's mayor, Volodymyr Mykolayenko, she delivered cash to hospitals every day so that doctors could receive their salaries in hryvnia, as the Russians forbade her to enter the institutions.

The defendant confirmed that she had participated in at least five meetings with the occupation authorities and attended their meetings three times, explaining "how the system works," but at the same time remained a member of the regional council. In the fall of 2022, she refused to leave Kherson with the Russians. In court, she partially pleaded guilty, referring to the Geneva Convention, which, in her opinion, allegedly protected her from criminal liability.

The prosecution's evidence was documents from the occupiers and witness testimony. According to one of them, Mezeritskaya convinced her to transfer to the occupation health department. Another witness said that the official informed her about her "new job" in the city council building.

The prosecutor asked for ten years in prison with confiscation of property, while the defense offered a lighter sentence. The court classified the defendant's actions under Article 5 of Article 111-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine - collaboration. The Geneva Convention, the court noted, does not exempt her from criminal liability because she did not provide direct medical care, but performed organizational and administrative functions for the occupiers.

The court decided not to confiscate her property: she will get back two apartments, a 2018 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid, and half of a 2016 trailer. In addition, she is banned from holding public office for 12 years. The sentence has not yet entered into force.

Mezherytska was born in Shepetivka, Khmelnytskyi Oblast, and previously headed the city's skin and venereal disease clinic, and from 2012 to 2022 she was the head of the health department of the Kherson City Council. In 2010, she was elected to the city council from the Communist Party, and in 2020, she was elected to the regional council from the Nash Krai party. In July 2024, the regional council deprived her of the right to speak at meetings.

Recently, the SBU exposed a resident of Kherson region who passed information about the positions of the Ukrainian military to Russian special services. According to the investigation, the dispatcher of the humanitarian headquarters of the Novokakhovka military administration regularly sent the coordinates of the Armed Forces units to the occupiers via Telegram.

Анна Бальчінос