A court in Russia's Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad has sentenced Maria Bontsler, a 66-year-old lawyer, to 12 years in a general-regime penal colony on treason charges. Mediazona attributed the verdict to the Kaliningrad Regional Court's press service, while The Moscow Times cited the legal rights project Slovo Zashite. According to Mediazona, prosecutors had asked for 15 years.
Investigators allege that in 2024 Bontsler passed Ukrainian intelligence information about officers of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in Kaliningrad. Those officers had investigated espionage, treason and terrorism cases in which she was defending the accused. She was detained in May 2025 and first charged with confidential cooperation with a foreign state. In March 2026 the charge was upgraded to state treason.
Bontsler denies the charges. Her defense says the information she allegedly passed on was not secret and had already been aired in open court hearings before the alleged transfer took place. The case file reportedly refers to correspondence with a person the FSB considers an officer of Ukraine's Security Service (SBU). Bontsler said she knew of no intelligence link and that any contact with strangers stemmed from her legal work. According to Mediazona, the correspondence itself was never shown to the defense.
The independent outlet Glasnaya, citing a Novaya Gazeta journalist, gave a fuller account of how the case arose. In its telling, the family of a client, Ivan Kveselevich, asked Bontsler to correspond on Telegram with a man presented as his cousin. Investigators say this man, named Dyachuk, was an SBU officer. Kveselevich later struck a plea deal and received two and a half years.
The trial was held behind closed doors. Judge Marochkin removed all three of Bontsler's retained lawyers, Ilya Sidorov, Alexander Chauzov and Roman Morozov. The removals followed a dispute over access to material the court classifies as state secrets, with the lawyers refusing to sign non-disclosure undertakings. The prosecutor also accused Morozov of illegally recording a closed hearing. Morozov, for his part, alleges that the regional court's chairman, Yevgeny Bykov, took part in the persecution, saying Bykov had cited treason when authorizing surveillance measures against him.
The court then appointed state lawyers. Bontsler succeeded in having one of them removed, and court-appointed lawyer Anastasia Rikhter went on to represent her. According to Slovo Zashite, Bontsler herself was removed from the courtroom and brought back only for her final statement, and her request to deliver it in open court was refused. She said she had been removed for protesting through prayer and did not know which materials had been read out or which witnesses questioned in her absence. She also said she had no real defenders at the trial.
In that final statement, Bontsler called the prosecution a political reprisal for the legal help she had given dissidents and opposition members. The Moscow Times reports that the human rights group Memorial considers her a political prisoner. According to her statement, the UN Human Rights Committee communicated a complaint in her case on 16 July 2025 and ordered urgent measures.
Bontsler has been held since May 2025 in a solitary cell in Kaliningrad's SIZO-1 pre-trial detention centre. Glasnaya reports that she is the only female defendant in what is a men's facility. She says she suffered cardiac arrest and several hypertensive crises in detention and did not receive adequate treatment. The Kaliningrad Region Bar Chamber suspended her status as a lawyer on 25 September 2025.
Bontsler's career began in the 1990s, when she defended conscripts sent to the First Chechen War. She chaired Kaliningrad's Soldiers' Mothers Committee for about 30 years. According to rights advocates, by the summer of 2022 she was handling at least 45 cases under Russia's law against "discrediting" the army. That June she was fined under the same law over courtroom speeches in which she called Russia's invasion of Ukraine an attack. Glasnaya describes this as the only case in modern Russia of a lawyer being administratively punished for a speech in court.