A Moscow judge has sentenced journalist Daria Shipacheva to 12 years in prison after finding her guilty of treason, the exiled outlet Mediazona reported Wednesday.
The science outlet T-Invariant, citing five sources close to Shipacheva, who was born in Ukraine, reported that the Moscow City Court’s guilty verdict stems from a wire transfer she made to a Ukrainian family member.
“As far as we know, investigators took a transfer she made to a civilian family member, reinterpreted its purpose and built the entire treason charge around it,” an unidentified acquaintance of the journalist told T-Invariant.
Shipacheva was arrested in April 2025 and transferred to a detention facility in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don. According to T-Invariant, she was recently transferred to Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo prison.
Her trial, which Mediazona said lasted just 90 minutes, took place behind closed doors.
Shipacheva’s family and a court-appointed attorney decided against releasing any details about her arrest or trial. A friend of the journalist told T-Invariant that she opposed drawing public attention to her case out of fear it would lead to a harsher prison sentence.
“But recently, she asked us to invite reporters to the sentencing hearing,” the friend was quoted as saying.
The independent news outlet Sotavision published a video showing Shipacheva’s shocked reaction to the judge’s verdict on Wednesday.
Shipacheva’s defense team had asked the judge to give her a lighter sentence since she had cooperated with law enforcement officials and pleaded guilty.
Between 2019 and 2025, Shipacheva worked as a freelance medical journalist for Forbes Russia, in addition to outlets like RBC, Takie Dela and others.
Before her arrest, T-Invariant reported that Shipacheva was subjected to online harassment by members of the banned ultra-nationalist group “Male State” over her feminist views.
Russian courts convicted a record 312 people on charges of treason, espionage and illegal cooperation with a foreign state in the first half of 2026, according to the exiled news outlet Vyorstka.
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