“Who’d think a last name could turn people into monsters?” Ukrainian Iryna Navalna, Alexei Navalny namesake, gets 8 years in Russia after torture

A court in Rostov-on-Don has sentenced 26-year-old Iryna Navalna to 8 years in prison. Two years ago, she was captured in occupied Mariupol and accused of preparing a terrorist attack during the ‘referendum’ on joining Russia. Mediazona explored what role her surname played in the case, why Iryna did not immediately report torture in detention, how the main witness for the prosecution changed his testimony, and why the court imposed a punishment almost twice less than the prosecutor requested.

“Ira has my maiden name. She took her grandfather’s surname, because family was very important to us. My mom passed away in 2015 and her grandad, my dad, lived on. So one day we were sitting and talking and we found out with him that his lineage ends with us girls. I said: ‘Baby, it would be cool if you gave your children the surname Navalna to continue the family line.’ She says: ‘So I’ll change my surname, then I’ll get married and give my children a double surname.’ She did that in 2019,’ says Alexandra Skachko, the mother of 26-year-old Iryna Navalna, who was sentenced to eight years in a penal colony in a terrorism case on October 7 by the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don.

The Navalny surnameLate Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s surname is originally Ukrainian. In fact, many of his relatives from his father’s side still live there—and he often came to visit them as a child. Iryna Navalna is not related to Alexei. In this article, we’re using the Ukrainian spelling of her surname (the Russian spelling would be ‘Navalnaya,’ as in the case of Alexei’s widow Yulia).

The woman’s family is from Mariupol, a Ukrainian port city where almost half a million people lived before the start of the full-scale invasion. In 2022, it was almost completely destroyed and occupied by Russian troops after a long blockade. More than half of the local residents were forced to leave.

Irina and her mother also became refugees: they left Mariupol on 9 May 2022, a couple of weeks before the city was completely taken over by the Russians. Navalna’s paternal grandmother Valentina Skachko refused to leave her home. Her stepfather, Vladimir Stolyar, was among the defenders of Azovstal. At the end of May, he left the plant together with the rest of the Ukrainian military and has been a prisoner of war in Russian ever since.

Iryna and Alexandra had to leave Mariupol through the occupied territories, which also meant ‘filtration’: arbitrary questioning and searches at checkpoints, which often resulted in arrests and torture. That’s when Navalna first had problems because of her surname, the same as the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

“It took her a really long time to get through filtration,” Alexandra says. “They mocked her, they picked on her surname: ‘Ah, Navalna! Well, you are, like, Navalny’s bastard daughter.’ They put her up against the wall and put a gun to her head. And there were also elderly people sitting there, whose son-in-law used to help our military. So [the Russians] are really going at them, and there’s my little girl, with a gun to her head, and they are calling their colleagues, saying, ‘Come on, who wants to see Navalna?’ My daughter was telling me all this, and I said: ‘God, my baby, who knew that a family name would turn people into monsters like this?’”

After travelling through the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Russia and the Baltic States, Iryna and her mother found themselves back in Ukraine, in its unoccupied part. A few months later, at the end of August, Navalna decided to return to her hometown to visit her grandmother who had stayed behind. As soon as communication with the occupied city was re-established, Alexandra remembers with a sigh, Iryna started to call her grandmother. The elderly woman would cry and say how much she missed her, suggesting: “Baby, come to the sea.” Alexandra herself was totally against her daughter’s trip, but she could not change Iryna’s mind.

“Mom, do you really want to fight over this? We can fight, but I’ll still go. I’m a big girl, I’ve made up my mind. I won’t stay long, just a month or so. I’ll help my grandmother, until they at least get electricity there or something. I’ll get my father’s photos, collect our winter clothes and be on my way back,” Alexandra recalls Irina’s reasoning.

At that time, there were already established routes from Ukrainian-controlled territory in the Zaporizhzhia region to occupied Mariupol—and back. Some family acquaintances used them to pick up animals or try to find documents and anything that had survived from the house. This is how Iryna found herself in Mariupol with the help of a carrier.

Arrest

A month in her hometown flew by quickly for Iryna. She lived in a flat with her grandmother, went to the Azov Sea almost every day, and called her mother in the evening. By the end of September, she had already booked a place in the car to return to the Ukrainian-controlled territory.

On the morning of September 27, Iryna Navalna, as usual, rode her bicycle to the coast. “Everyone realised that there might be no other chance to take a look at the sea, so my girl went there to say goodbye to the sea,” says Alexandra. “These were the days of the ‘referendum’. Anyone who was passing by, travelling anywhere was stopped and checked. She was stopped, checked. Then, she said, they called somewhere, ran something through the databases, and that's how they picked her up.”

Iryna’s mother learned that she had been detained from a relative who lives abroad and sent her a message from RIA Novosti, the Russian state news agency, saying that Navalna was suspected of preparing a terrorist attack on the last day of the ‘referendum’ on DPR’s accession to Russia. According to the news piece, the young woman had already confessed that she’d been recruited by the SSU and had agreed to take an explosive device from a half-destroyed house, plant it near the administration building, and then remotely detonate it.

“I froze, and my head immediately boiled. There was a feeling that this could not be true,” Alexandra Skachko recalls. “I immediately called the volunteers who helped me file my husband as missing. I survived the night, and in the morning I started filing my daughter everywhere, so that she could be included in the register of prisoners of war as soon as possible. There was no time to get discouraged. As you might guess, I went to bed and woke up in tears, but then one pulls themselves together and continues working. Only now it’s not just your husband, but two people.”

Donetsk detention centre

After being detained, Iryna Navalna was taken to the police station. Before the full-scale Russian invasion, the young woman, as she later told the court in Rostov, had been an intern at the same station. Iryna studied IT, but decided to become a patrol officer. She was not accepted for this position, so she started working as a call centre operator in the police.

“I think that the surname, Navalna, was the initial reason of her detention. The second reason, a hundred per cent, was that she worked in the police, and also that her stepfather is from Azov. These three reasons,” Alexandra says. “And they picked on the surname. [Alexei] Navalny was a real threat to the current Russian government, so, naturally, this surname was not just a trigger for all political structures and law enforcers, it was like a red rag to a bull.”

Iryna was interrogated and “re-enacted” her alleged crime: shown on camera where she had supposedly taken the explosives and where she had planted them. This footage later appeared in Russian propaganda media. The young woman was taken to Donetsk and sent to the pre-trial detention centre. She was charged with attempting to commit a terrorist act and illegal possession of explosives.

According to the investigation, Navalna was going to organise an explosion near an administrative building in occupied Mariupol. At that time, the “referendum” on the accession of the self-proclaimed DPR to Russia was held there. The prosecution alleged that Navalna, “protesting against the sovereignty of the DPR,” conspired with a representative of the Ukrainian security services and received 25,000 hryvnias from an accomplice in the city of Zaporizhzhia to buy a bicycle Эfor the purpose of secretly transporting an improvised explosive device.” After the attack, she was supposed to leave Mariupol and receive another 100,000 hryvnias from the recruiter as a reward, the prosecution claimed.

Iryna’s grandmother Valentina Skachko told Mediazona how she travelled from Mariupol to Donetsk and tried to get a date with her granddaughter, with no success. After Iryna was placed in detention, they were able to see each other: the woman recalled that the law enforcers twice brought the girl home in handcuffs to “shoot a film.”

The NTV propaganda channel later produced a whole story about Iryna Navalna. In it, the woman recounts her version of how the SSU representative, with “blackmail and money,” talked her into preparing a terrorist attack (she said that otherwise they threatened to harm her mother). At some points she tries to refuse to talk to journalists. All this is interspersed with the host’s sarcastic off-screen comments.

Prisoner of war Vladimir Stolyar, Navalna’s stepfather, was also shown on NTV. The man, in a prison uniform and with his hands behind his back, is sitting on a chair. He says he doesn’t believe Iryna could have committed crime, and then adds that if it’s true, he “feels regret” because she’s “ruining her life.”

Irina herself, When Iryna got a chance to see her grandmother, she asked her not to watch the NTV story.

“She was allowed to see Irochka for just a few minutes during the interrogation when she was still in Donetsk. Ira quietly told her: ‘Grandma, don’t watch this film, I was beaten on the head to say what I say there,’” Alexandra Skachko recounts. “I forced myself to watch it once. There is not a word of truth in it. Irochka tries to talk about her life, about her studies, and they glue her words together, turning them inside out.”

In January 2023, human rights activist Olga Romanova wrote that Iryna was tortured in the Donetsk pre-trial detention centre, referring to the stories of other Ukrainian women who were imprisoned with Navalna and were eventually exchanged. Alexandra Skachko said she knew that “torture was severe at first” because the security forces “needed to break her.”

“My daughter was severely beaten before she was placed with our girls [other Ukrainian PoWs]. For a fortnight, she was in a cell with other women, convicts who were in there for murder. They broke her, roughly speaking. That’s how she got to our girls’ cell. Then there was just bullying of everyone, in general. They were kept on their feet the whole day long. They were not allowed to sit down. They were not allowed to laugh or cry. For any loud noise they were taken out of the cell, into the corridors, and beaten. They were not allowed to go out for walks, they had no proper windows.”

Trial in Rostov-on-Don

Iryna spent a year in the Donetsk pre-trial detention centre. In October 2023, the investigation into her case was completed and it was transferred to the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don. The conditions in the Rostov detention centre were better, says Alexandra Skachko.

“During the time my daughter has been in this hell… I just cannot understand how people with whom we breathed the same air, lived on the same land, in the Donetsk region, could turn out to be the most cruel of all those who hold our prisoners all over Russia. This is the Donetsk pre-trial detention centre. We have the same way of life, we have the same mentality. Why are you so cruel to your own people? Why is the attitude in Rostov, where Russians are softer with our prisoners, to our captives, so different from Donetsk? I cannot understand.”

Iryna herself was only able to talk about what really happened to her in Donetsk only after she was transferred to Rostov-on-Don.

Iryna’s story about torture at one of the court hearings was quoted by the media Slovo Zashchite (The Floor Is Given to the Defence). According to Navalna, she was beaten immediately after being brought to the police station:

“I said that I had not committed any crime. They put me on a chair and started beating me on the head, on my legs, they hit me in the thigh with a stun gun. They promised that they would not let me go for sure, but if I confessed to everything, I would be quickly exchanged with Ukraine and go to my mother. They told me that they knew where my mom lived and where my grandmother lived. In the end, I agreed to incriminate myself in order to save my life and the lives of my relatives.

I was taken to my home by the investigators. They instructed me: ‘You will have to point your finger at the cupboard and say that you had explosives there. In the flat they found the ID of my stepfather, who had served in Azov.

The next day, I was taken to the Department of Internal Affairs in Donetsk. There, with another portion of electroshock, they made sure I learned what I was supposed to say. Then I was taken to the pre-trial detention centre, where they took away all the things my grandmother had given me.

A week later, reporters came to the detention centre to make a film about me. At first I refused to talk to them because I did not want to spread information about what had happened to me. For this I was beaten again and sent to the basement, where prisoners of war were held. [The guards] used to take us out of the cell with a bag over our heads and beat us with sticks for fun.”

Iryna Navalnaya was defended in court by lawyer Ivan Bondarenko. He says that in addition to the woman’s confession, the proof of her guilt is based on the words of several witnesses.

One of them, deputy chief of the criminal investigation department of the Primorsky district police in Mariupol, surnamed Kitaygora, claimed during interrogations that he saw a certain young woman riding a bicycle past the district administration building, where “there was a polling station.” According to Kitaygora, at about 9 a.m., the woman threw a bag near the building and immediately left. In the bag he found an object that looked like an explosive device. He immediately called the police, told them what the woman looked like, and cordoned off the place. After Iryna Navalna was detained, he identified her as the woman on the bicycle.

Another witness said he saw the woman outside the administrative building as well—and then heard a man shout: “Take cover! Take cover!” He claimed that he learned the cyclist had planted the explosives during questioning.

“When questioned in court, Kitaigora changed his testimony. He said that he did not see anything, that he heard about it only after Navalna had already been detained,’ says Bondarenko. “Another eyewitness, who referred to Kitaigora’s words ‘Careful, take cover,’ continued to claim in court that Kitaigora saw [the moment of planting the explosives]. So basically this second witness tried to confirm his testimony, which he had previously denied in court. Apparently, they couldn’t coordinate with each other.”

It’s unclear why the policeman decided to change his testimony. After his statement in court, the prosecutor only demanded that Kitaygora’s testimony given during the investigation be read out, Navalna’s attorney says..

The lawyer insists that the criminal case itself “should not have been started” because there was no event of the crime. This, in his opinion, is proved both by the “sabotage of the witness” and by the absence of any evidence other than what they were able to beat out of Iryna through torture.

“She really didn’t contemplate, had no contact with anyone, no discussions,” says Bondakenko. “She is absolutely, one hundred per cent a civilian.”

On 7 October, the Southern District Military Court heard the oral arguments. The prosecutor asked to find Iryna Navalna guilty, sentence her to 14 years in a medium security penal colony and impose a 400,000 rouble fine.

The verdict was carried out the same day. The court mitigated Navalnaya’s charges: she was sentenced under Part 1 of Article 205 of the Russian Criminal Code (“act of terrorism”) instead of Part 2 (when the “crime is committed by a group of persons in preliminary conclusion or by an organised group”). The term was set at eight years in a penal colony. No fine was imposed.

According to lawyer Bondarenko, such a mild sentence compared to the one requested by the prosecutor shows that the court understands that Iryna Navalna is innocent.

Her mother, with whom Mediazona spoke before the verdict, said that the details of the sentence are completely unimportant. “Iryna was given the status of a prisoner of war in Ukraine. We do not take this swindler court seriously at all, because it’s all fabricated and my child is simply being held forcibly in captivity. In any case, our only option is to exchange her.”

Nevertheless, the defence lawyer plans to appeal the verdict.

Editor: Maria Klimova