A resident of Sochi was sent to a colony for an SMS about military equipment sent to an acquaintance on the eve of the conflict with Georgia

The Krasnodar regional court sentenced Oksana Sevastidi, a saleswoman from Sochi, to seven years in prison for an SMS message about a train with military equipment, which she sent in 2008 to a friend from Georgia before the armed conflict, lawyer Ivan Pavlov told Meduza.

by judge Vladimir Kobzev on March 3, 2016 It is noted that the verdict was handed down , but this became known only now. Sevastidi was found guilty of treason.

According to the lawyer, the woman wrote to a friend that she saw a train in Sochi that was heading towards Abkhazia. Pavlov intends to secure Sevastidi’s release, pointing out that the verdict contains much more information about the technology than the woman’s SMS message.

“From the point of view of the informational significance and sensitivity of the information, her SMS, if compared with the verdict, is like a drop and a sea,” he explained.

In the Meduza article under the headline “Knight against the FSB” about Pavlov, it is specified that Sevastidi was arrested in early 2015. According to the lawyer, it took so long to initiate a criminal case because the message was intercepted using a system of technical means for operational-search activities (SORM) and “the SMS was being recorded all the time,” “the array of information was sorted out.”

In 2014, Sochi resident Ekaterina Kharebava was sentenced to six years in prison on a similar charge. In June 2016, Kharebava was among three released Georgian citizens who were prosecuted for espionage.

The armed conflict involving Georgia and Russia officially lasted five days in August 2008. Russia participated in a “peace enforcement operation.” In early 2016, the International Criminal Court opened a case into the killings of ethnic Georgians during the conflict. As a result of the conflict, Russia recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.