A former judge from Berdyansk has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for passing information about Azov regiment servicemen to Russian occupiers. The verdict came into force after the case was reviewed by Ukrainian courts.
After Berdyansk fell under Russian control in February 2022, the woman did not evacuate and instead began collaborating with the occupation administration. The investigation established that she provided data on specific fighters — information that under occupation conditions directly threatened their lives and the safety of their families.
The court qualified her actions as state treason — one of the most serious articles in Ukraine's Criminal Code. The penalty provides for 12 to 15 years, and the court imposed the maximum sentence.
This case is not isolated. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian law enforcement has opened thousands of proceedings for collaboration and state treason, with officials, law enforcement officers, and judges among the suspects. A person with legal education and access to sensitive data becomes a particularly dangerous source for the occupier: they understand what information has operational value.
The context is also telling: after the defense of Mariupol, Azov became a symbolic target of Russian propaganda. Data about its fighters — their names, connections, locations of relatives' residences — had obvious practical value for the occupiers.
The verdict came against the backdrop of ongoing discussion about whether Ukraine sufficiently verified the loyalty of civil servants in temporarily occupied territories before 2022. If the judge had access to operational data even before the occupation — the question about systemic gaps in personnel security remains open.
