DONETSK — Tetiana Montian spent years making Moscow’s case, down to an address to the UN Security Council a week before Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine. On Monday a court in Donetsk sentenced her to 18 months in a general-regime penal colony over a single phrase from 2022.
The Voroshilovsky inter-district court found her guilty of public calls to extremism online and banned her from administering websites for two years. Its press release, which describes only the administrator of a Telegram channel and does not name her, says the verdict has not yet taken effect. Her case echoes that of Ilya Remeslo, a Kremlin loyalist turned critic who was arrested in July on army-fakes charges.
What makes the sentence stand out is her record. Born in Kerch in 1972, Montian backed Russia and its proxies from 2014, moved to Russia in 2021 and took Russian citizenship. The Kyiv Independent reported that she has criticised Vladimir Putin largely for not fighting the war more effectively. She also turned on Kremlin commentators, and Vladimir Solovyov has accused her of misappropriating donations raised for Russian troops, an accusation Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said came with no evidence in the reports it cited.
The sources do not agree on the basics. The court says that in December 2022, as administrator of a Telegram channel, she published a call for hostile violent actions against a group of people. The Kyiv Independent reported that the conviction rests on a 2022 video stream in which she called for “taking down” the Russian regime’s propagandists “without the slightest regret.” It added that the Russian verb can mean to kill, and that Montian says she meant banning hostile accounts. RFE/RL’s Russian service, in its own account of the verdict, calls it a written post and dates the criminal case to September 2025.
Montian links the prosecution to her posts about how Russian authorities behave in the Ukrainian territories Russia holds. RFE/RL reported that she said she had got in somebody’s way, and she named no one. In February she said, in words the Kyiv Independent quoted, that “there is absolutely unrestrained terror” in parts of the Donbas under Russian control.
Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial monitoring service, put her on its list of terrorists and extremists in October 2025. In August a court in Pskov gave Yabloko’s Lev Shlosberg 11 years and one month on speech charges, and TEH reported that he too was added to that register.
The court release gives no date within December 2022, no name for the people the call targeted and no account of how the judge read the verb at the centre of the case. Whether it meant ban or kill is the question the sentence answers without explaining.
