Ukrainian political prisoner abducted and given a new sentence after 8 years in Russian prison

A Russian court has sentenced Hennadiy Lymeshko to two years’ maximum-security imprisonment on insane ‘extremism’ charges laid, in secret, after he was abducted by the FSB from a temporary holding unit for foreign nationals.  Lymeshko is a recognized political prisoner who had served an 8-year sentence to the end and should have been freed in February 2025 and returned to his wife and daughter in Ukraine.

The information about the sentence passed by’ judge’ Sergei Nikolaevich Mironiuk from the Kursk district court in Stavropol region on 30 July 2025 could easily have passed unnoticed as the court information concealed both Lymeshko’s name, and that of the prosecutor.  On 3 August, however, a Telegram channel entitled ‘No to extremism’ and linked with Russia’s FSB, reported the sentence, naming Lymeshko.  It was claimed that a mystery ‘investigation’ had established that “Hennadiy Lymeshko posted material on his social networks in which he publicly called to violence based on nationality.”  He was charged with so-called ‘public calls to carry out extremism via the Internet, under Article 280 § 2 of Russia’s criminal code.  No details are provided as to what the alleged posts on social media actually said and when they are claimed to have been posted.  This is of obvious importance given that Lymeshko had been in Russian captivity since 2017.

Hennadiy has already missed eight years of his daughter’s childhood, and Russia is now planning to steal another two.  Given sinister threats earlier and the fact that the FSB held him incommunicado for six months, it is to be hoped that this will be the end of Russia’s brutal reprisals against the young Ukrainian. 

It seems likely that Hennadiy Lymeshko (b. 29.12.1992) has been targeted because he earlier defended Ukraine in Donbas, initially as part of a volunteer battalion linked with Right Sector, one of the Ukrainian nationalist movements that Russia has particularly demonized, and then as a contract soldier.  It was while he was serving in Donbas in 2016 that he met his wife Iryna, a medical student from Lviv who was working as a paramedic during the university holidays.  Hennadiy left military service after the birth of their daughter. 

It was because he needed a job that, despite his wife’s warranted concern, Lymeshko agreed to an offer of work in occupied Crimea.  Essentially any Ukrainian was, and remains, in danger on occupied territory, with young men who have served in Ukraine’s Armed Forces at particular risk.  

Lymeshko was seized on 12 August 2017 in Sudak, taken to a basement where he was subjected to beatings, electric shocks and other forms of torture, and threatened with reprisals against his family.  He was later taken from the basement to the place where the FSB staged and videoed his supposed arrest.  They reported his ‘arrest’ on 15 August 2017, claiming that he had arrived in Crimea on 12 August, and that, through his arrest, they had “prevented several acts of sabotage against infrastructure and vital services in Crimea” He was supposed to be “an agent of Ukraine’s Security Service, or SBU in the Kherson oblast, sent to Crimea to carry out acts of sabotage’. The video performance produced appeared to show Lymeshko being seized by a group of people who used force against him until he asserted that “they told me to cut an electricity post”.   He had allegedly planned to cut this concrete post with a handsaw which was seen lying on the ground near him.

A supposed ‘interrogation’ was shown in which Lymeshko, showing signs of having been beaten, ‘confessed’ to carrying out explosions on an electricity line in occupied Crimea for somebody called ‘Andriy’ from the SBU. They also claimed that he was supposed to set fire to a forest in the Sudak – Rybachye – Alushta area and one other act of arson, and to cause a rock avalanche that would block a highway.

Despite the absurdity of the allegations and lack of any evidence, Lymeshko was sentenced on 10 May 2018 by ‘judge’ Yevgeny Rykov from the occupation ‘Sudak city court’ to eight years’ imprisonment in a medium-security prison colony.  Rykov claimed that there was a political motive of “hostility to the Russian Federation in connection with the reunification (sic) of Crimea” and that this constituted an aggravating factor. The sentence was upheld on 24 June 2018 by the occupation ‘Crimean high court’.

At the end of August 2023, Lymeshko was transferred to “harsh conditions of imprisonment’ [SUS] for the duration of his sentence.  There was concern then that Russia might be fabricating new charges as it was claimed that the Ukrainian political prisoner had “recruited Russian citizens to fight on Ukraine’s side”.   

Concern then mounted in February 2025 when Lymeshko’s eight-year sentence came to an end.  He was initially moved to a holding unit for foreign nationals, but was taken from there by the FSB on, or around 13 March 2025, when Iryna last spoke with her husband.

This was far more reminiscent of an enforcement disappearance than an arrest.  Lymeshko was held incommunicado, quite possibly with no formal charge having been laid, and without access to a proper lawyer. The charge finally brought could not, in any way, justify the secrecy applied, and no charge would make it admissible to hold a person in isolation, without any legal protection or contact with his family. The FSB typically use such periods, where the person is not even officially in their custody, to  apply torture and other forms of duress to try to extract a ‘confession’.  In July,  he was added to Russia’s notorious ‘Register of extremists and terrorists’, a list containing a considerable number of political prisoners, including many Crimean Tatars and other Ukrainians.