‘He continues to support them’ Russia sentences former Yandex employee to 15 years in prison for donating $500 to Ukraine over three years ago
A Russian court has sentenced a former Yandex employee to 15 years in prison for donating money to the Ukrainian army in the initial days of Moscow’s full-scale invasion. In late 2022, after Vladimir Putin declared mobilization, Sergey Irin left Russia for Turkey and later moved to Sri Lanka. He was arrested in May 2024 in Nizhny Novgorod, where he had come on a short trip to visit his family. Meduza shares key details from a Mediazona report on how the Russian authorities have pursued Irin and other citizens who have donated money to Ukraine.
The Moscow City Court has sentenced former Yandex employee Sergey Irin to 15 years in prison and fined him five million rubles ($62,000) on treason charges for transferring $500 to a nonprofit that supports the Ukrainian army in 2022, Mediazona reports.
At the hearing where the verdict was announced, Irin refused to stand up. Instead, he held up a sign that read, “Putin is a dickhead!” According to Mediazona, at the start of the trial, Irin had asked for this same phrase to be relayed to attendees during witness questioning, earning him repeated verbal warnings from the judge.
Irin, a programmer, donated to Ukraine’s Come Back Alive foundation using his Russian bank card on February 27, 2022, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. He later left Russia, living in Turkey and Sri Lanka, before returning in April 2024 to visit family and friends. It was during this visit that he was arrested.
Irin has not denied that he knowingly sent the money “for the needs of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.” One of his relatives told Mediazona: “He supports Ukraine, so he made the transfer. And he continues to support them.”
A video of his arrest published by the Federal Security Service (FSB) shows agents violently pulling Irin to the ground and handcuffing him. In a police vehicle afterwards, he’s asked, “How do you view the current authorities?”
“Negatively,” he responds.
“Have you taken part in protest rallies?”
“I have,” Irin says.
After his arrest, Irin later wrote, the officers used a taser to interrogate him before transporting him by plane to Moscow’s Lefortovo remand prison.
Mediazona notes that the Russian authorities are increasingly opening treason cases against citizens who have donated money to Ukraine — and that it’s relatively easy for them to find out about such donations. For those who did so with Russian bank cards in the war’s early days (before sanctions made it impossible), the government can easily access payment records, which banks are required to share with the Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring).
Russians who used foreign cards to make their donations, on the other hand, can be caught while crossing the border, where officers can order them to unlock their phones and open their banking apps. This is how the $51 donation made by Russian-American dual citizen Ksenia Karelina, who was imprisoned in Russia on treason charges until she was freed in a prisoner swap in April 2025, was discovered.
We usually do the talking at fundraisers. This time, we’ll let our readers speak for us. “I’m just a regular guy who recently graduated from college and used to send Meduza a hundred rubles every month. Putin stole my country from me, took away my ability to speak out, and even my freedom to spend my own hundred rubles. Please help Meduza! Freedom for Russia!” — Anonymous