A 65-year-old defense attorney says she nearly died in a Russian pretrial detention center. Now prosecutors want to imprison her for 15 years for treason.

Prosecutors have asked a court to sentence Kaliningrad lawyer Maria Bontsler to 15 years in prison, the legal news project Slovo Zashchite reported, citing lawyer Ilya Sidorov, who visited her in pretrial detention.Sidorov said prosecutors are also seeking a period of court-imposed restrictions on her movements and a fine of 10,000 rubles. Bontsler is expected to make her final statement in court on November 11.Bontsler, 65, is known for defending people in political cases. She was detained in late May 2025 and has remained in pretrial detention since then.Bontsler was initially investigated for confidential cooperation with a foreign state, an offense punishable by three to eight years in prison. The case was later reclassified as treason, which carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years.Investigators allege that in 2024, Bontsler was tasked with gathering information about law enforcement and security officers “uncovering and investigating” criminal cases against people “cooperating with an unfriendly state.” Investigators also allege that she gave “the intelligence services of an unfriendly state” information about criminal cases that she had obtained “through her work as a lawyer.”According to OVD-Info, Bontsler has been diagnosed with hypertensive heart disease, which causes spikes in her blood pressure and puts her at high risk of stroke. In June 2026, her defense team said she had nearly died in detention “because the medications she was prescribed were not coordinated with one another.”At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at [email protected].To read Meduza’s exclusive content in English, please subscribe to our newsletter.