Son of Yanukovych's bodyguard tortured officials from Kherson region

The Kherson City Court passed a verdict in absentia against an officer of the Russian Federal Security Service, finding him guilty of violating the laws and customs of war.

This was reported by the communication department of the Kherson regional police.

Yan Zanevsky, a 30-year-old Muscovite, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for cruel treatment of civilians. The convict is the son of Vyacheslav Zanevsky, the former head of security for fugitive President Viktor Yanukovych. The investigation found that the father, having access to databases, assisted his son in collecting information about pro-Ukrainian residents of Kherson, Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia regions, which became the basis for further repression during the occupation of 2022.

Positioning himself as a curator from the FSB in the Bilozersky district, Jan Zanevsky personally supervised detentions and torture. Among the identified victims is a 53-year-old woman who was held for two days in a seized courtroom, where Zanevsky beat her with a rubber baton, demanding that she record a fake video message. Another victim, a 54-year-old man, was tortured with electric shocks, forcing him to cooperate in organizing an illegal referendum. The occupier inflicted the greatest cruelty on the head of one of the settlements: the man was beaten on the head and tortured with electric shocks only because he answered in Ukrainian during interrogations in the seized Kherson police headquarters.

All the victims were held in inhumane and unsanitary conditions without hygiene products, food or access to a restroom. In addition to the Kherson episodes, Zanevsky is known as the head of a filtration camp in Zaporizhzhia. This is not his first sentence: in 2025, he also received 14 years in absentia for torturing a civilian woman in Kamianka-Dniprovska. According to the aggregate of crimes, the actions of the Russian security officer are qualified as violations of the laws and customs of war committed by a group of persons by prior conspiracy.

Катерина Глушко