20 September 2026, 20:46
A woman from the Odesa region was ordered to read Bagryany and write a review
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PHOTO: mirava.com.ua
A resident of Odesa was found guilty of justifying Russian aggression. The court sentenced her to five years of imprisonment with a probationary period and ordered her to read Ivan Bagryany’s *Tiger Hunters* and *The Garden of Gethsemane* , as well as the 1994Memorandumon Security Assurances.
This is stated in the verdict of the Dobroslavsky District Court of the Odesa Region.
According to the case file, between July and October 2025, the defendant communicated three times via the “chat roulette” video chat service with a well-known YouTube blogger. During the online conversation, she claimed that Russia was “reclaiming its lands,” denied the fact of aggression, and justified the shelling of residential neighborhoods in Kharkiv. In addition, the woman called on Ukraine to surrender and cede approximately 20% of its territory to Russia, and she also denied the unitary nature of the Ukrainian state.
Read also an interview with Alexander Garsky, a judge at the Khadzhibey District Court in Odesa, who assigns reading books as part of the punishment for criminals.
The conversations were recorded on video, which the blogger posted on his channel. The videos garnered between 7,000 and 22,000 views.
In court, the woman fully admitted her guilt and stated that she was unaware the conversations were being recorded. She described her remarks as “joking” responses to her interlocutor’s provocative questions.
In addition to a sentence of five years’ imprisonment with a three-year probationary period, the court ordered the woman to read Ivan Bahriany’s novels *The Tiger Hunters* and *The Garden of Gethsemane*, as well as the text of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. She must also submit written reviews of the material to the probation office, ranging from 100 to 500 words in length, over the next few months.
As previously reported by Intent, the judge who had required criminals to read these works acquitted a medical examiner from Odesa. The judge took into account that the doctor’s only mistake was that, when submitting this declaration to the electronic registry of declarations, she marked the declaration type as “candidate for office” instead of “annual.”
