Convicted of ‘treason’ in Russia, journalist Darya Shipacheva was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Almost nothing is known about her case. Here’s what her friend revealed.

In spring 2025, security forces detained 34-year-old Darya Shipacheva at her Moscow apartment and took her to the pretrial detention center in Rostov-on-Don, from which she was transferred to the Lefortovo pretrial detention center in Moscow. On July 29, 2026, a Moscow court sentenced the journalist to 12 years in prison on charges of “treason” over a money transfer to Ukraine.Darya Shipacheva is 35 years old. She was born in Ukraine, grew up in Russia’s Kursk Region, and later moved to Moscow. Shipacheva worked as a medical and science journalist, writing for RBC, Takie Dela, Wonderzine, and Forbes Woman, and published a book on medicine and health called Bez paniki (“Don’t Panic”). She also worked as an activist, organizing rallies in support of the Khachaturyan sisters and feminist activist Yulia Tsvetkova. Because of her support for women’s rights, Darya received threats from Male State.Shipacheva’s friend Taya told the independent journalist cooperative Bereg why Darya, unlike her, chose to stay in Russia after the war began, and how she is coping with her imprisonment now. Meduza is publishing the interview in full.‘She’s a little more cheerful in messages than in real life’— How did you meet Dasha?— We met in 2021 on Facebook, after one of my friends reposted one of Dasha’s posts and I left a few comments under it. She friended me, messaged me privately, and we started talking.I don’t remember what the post was about anymore, but Dasha wrote about all kinds of things — women’s rights, mental health, among others. She’s sociable and open, and plenty of people would jump into discussions with her; it was clear she had a wide circle of friends.I was living in St. Petersburg then, and she was in Moscow. We traded video messages constantly — literally millions of them every day, from walks, from work, and wherever she happened to be. Dasha likes talking about herself and shares a lot, and since we both have ADHD, we’d talk about our mental states too.She’d spent years battling depression, with mixed success, though recently — while she was still free — she’d been doing well on that front.Dasha was also deeply attached to her apartment in Moscow — for her it was practically sacred. She’d renovated it herself, which is another interest we share. That attachment is a big part of why she didn’t leave Russia: her home meant everything to her, and it gave her strength.— How did your first meeting go?— We both wanted to meet in person, and in spring 2022 I went to Moscow to see her. I had other things to do there, but meeting Dasha was the main event. We spent several hours together, walked around Shabolovka, and went to Danilovsky Market — neither of us wanted to leave. When I got back to St. Petersburg, we kept talking, almost every day, even more than before we’d met in person.— What was she like in person?— The same, except she’s a bit more cheerful in writing. Her letters from the pretrial detention center are upbeat too — she tries not to worry anyone or be a burden.— Was that meeting in 2022 the only one?— Yes. I left Russia soon after that, and we kept writing to each other while I was in Yerevan. She supported me.“She was never a resistance fighter”— Why didn’t she leave after the war started?— In her messages, Dasha expressed fairly patriotic views — not the flag-waving kind, but more along the lines of, “I love Russia, I love the people here. Moscow is my home.” She couldn’t imagine giving that up, and she worried that people who stayed in Russia were seen [by those who had left] as traitors, cursed and insulted every which way.After I emigrated, I was doing really badly at first, and Dasha kept trying to convince me to come back. She understood the situation [in the country] was difficult, of course, but she believed that if you don’t stick your neck out, nothing will happen to you.— Did you argue with her about it?— I told her I didn’t believe that and that I was genuinely scared. Then I left Armenia for another country, and things got better for me — that’s when Dasha stopped trying to talk me into coming back.— How did you two talk about the war?— We didn’t talk about it much. There was a lot of sadness and longing, of course, because life had changed forever and there wasn’t much we could do about it. It affected Dasha a great deal — she went through periods with very little energy. She’s a sensitive, delicate person, and I think the war made her mental state worse.Dasha isn’t the type to argue endlessly with her family and insist she’s right. Honestly, she was never a resistance fighter.— Did she ever speak out publicly against the war?— I don’t think so — at least I don’t know of it, and I never saw any antiwar posts from her.— How did you find out Dasha had been arrested? — I don’t remember it well, because I was in shock. We last messaged each other on March 31, 2025. Then she suddenly disappeared, which wasn’t like her — but she’d started a master’s program in 2024 and was preparing to defend her thesis, so I figured she was writing it and didn’t want to be disturbed.Then I started getting nervous. Once a week I’d write to her: “Where are you? What happened? Where did you disappear to? Are you mad at me about something?” She wasn’t answering or even reading the messages. Once I realized something strange was going on, I started tracking down her work contacts through mutual friends — I wrote to maybe five or seven people, and one of them told me Dasha had been arrested.One of her friends had set up a support chat, and I was added to it. But even there no one said much — everyone was scared, and they still are. The unspoken rule was to focus on writing letters to Dasha and sending packages, nothing more — no questions, no talk of politics. They still enforce that in the chat.For about a year, I didn’t really know what had happened — only that she’d been arrested and would get a long sentence. Eventually I managed to get information out of someone and learned the case appeared to involve treason, though even that conversation was vague.— When did you write to her for the first time?— Almost right after I found out about the arrest, though at first I couldn’t process it or find the words. I was sure nothing would get through from Armenia, so I asked someone in the chat to print out my letter and drop it in a mailbox in St. Petersburg. The letter took three weeks to arrive, and the reply took about as long.Now I send her a long letter every couple of months, and I get one back too — about four pages.— What did Dasha write in her first letter? — Her first letter from prison read: “I’ve thought a lot about what I wrote you about coming back to Russia. I was wrong. Don’t come back. Nothing here will ever be good.” That was a shock — before, she’d never given up hope that things would get better.— Did Dasha tell you what she’d been arrested for?— She didn’t write anything about the case at all — it’s all classified (most cases involving state security charges are classified — Bereg’s note). As I understand it, a censor could simply cut that out, and I think she was very afraid of that. I was afraid to ask, too.‘She writes that when she gets out, she’ll come to me in Europe and work in a café’— What does Dasha ask you to send in care packages? — All kinds of food — apparently the food at the pretrial detention center isn’t very good, and I assume Dasha shares it with her cellmates. We’ve also sent her a lot of books, mostly uplifting ones. I recommended Podstrochnik “The Interlinear” in particular — it’s a book about how dark times eventually end. Unfortunately, once Dasha was transferred from the pretrial detention center in Rostov to Lefortovo in Moscow, all her books were confiscated, and now she has to buy them all over again.— How does Dasha herself feel about what happened?— She’s very afraid of going to prison, afraid conditions there will be worse than at the pretrial detention center. She’s also worried her cat, Luna, won’t live to see her released — that’s an enormous source of pain for her. After the arrest, we found Luna a good home, and Dasha asks us to send her photos.Sometimes she’s in a positive mood — she writes that when she gets out, she’ll come to me in Europe and work in a café, learn French, and walk around Paris. Her outlook has changed. Now she writes only about leaving. Before, there wasn’t even talk of that.— Does she tell you about the conditions there?— She doesn’t say anything about the conditions or her cellmates. She wrote that she can’t talk about it in detail.She’s said only that things overall aren’t too bad, that conditions at the pretrial detention center in Rostov are decent — except that it’s very hard to get medical care. Dasha wrote that when something hurts, she talks herself into feeling less pain. They allowed her antidepressants, which honestly amazed me. Overall, her mental state is pretty good.From her letters, I gathered she’d settled on a strategy for dealing with the pretrial detention center staff: staying out of conflict. They told her directly it was in her interest not to draw attention to herself. She also said there’d been a deliberate effort to keep the case out of the media entirely, so no one would know about it before sentencing.— Who told her it was better not to draw attention?— Her state-appointed defense attorney. He was assigned to her right away, and she kept him on because she liked him. He told her that if she kept a low profile, she’d get the minimum sentence. In my letters, I asked her to reconsider whether that strategy was right — I tried to talk her out of it, but it didn’t work. Then, quite recently, in July, she wrote to one of the other women: “I want there to be journalists at the trial.”— Why did she change her mind?— We don’t really understand it ourselves. It might be her second defense attorney’s strategy — Dasha’s parents hired him about halfway through the case.‘Someone she didn’t know wrote to her that people were digging up dirt on her’— Dasha was sentenced to 12 years over money transfers to Ukraine. Do you know anything about that? — No, I don’t believe it. Maybe it was a targeted transfer to someone she knew in Ukraine, or maybe someone wrote to her pretending to be an acquaintance and she believed them — I don’t know. But Dasha definitely wasn’t some kind of philanthropist.Maybe a cousin asked to borrow money. Dasha was born in Ukraine but grew up in Russia’s Kursk region, and she never told me about relatives or acquaintances there — I only found out about that recently.She actually flew abroad fairly often even during the war — to see friends, and also, I think, to a Taylor Swift concert in London. When I asked her how security checks went at the airport in Moscow, she told me: “I explain to them that I was just born in Kharkiv and was taken away before I turned one.” As far as I know, she never went back there after that.— There was also information that Male State targeted Dasha.— She never told me about that — maybe she didn’t want to worry me, since I’m not in Russia and couldn’t have helped anyway. But she did tell someone who was in Moscow at the time, writing that people were banging on her door. There was already some information about it circulating, but it wasn’t accurate — it made it sound like someone had deliberately set out to scare her, and that wasn’t the case.— According to sources cited by the independent, science-focused outlet T-invariant, someone wrote to her on social media: “We’re digging into you, they’ll come for you soon.”— Right, but that’s not actually how the message went. Someone she didn’t know wrote to warn her that people were digging up dirt on her — with good intentions, as I understand it — but she either didn’t believe it or didn’t know what to do about it. Either way, she thought it was safe to stay in Moscow.— How did her parents react to her arrest and sentence?— They hold different [pro-war] views, but Dasha never confronted them about it. They’re not wealthy, so to hire a defense attorney, we [with the support group] rented out Dasha’s apartment and raised money in the chat, since that still wasn’t enough.— And how did you and her other friends react to the sentence?— Yesterday [July 29], it was very hard for me. I still can’t quite process that without a new exchange [of prisoners between Russia and Western countries], Dasha will be in prison for a very long time. I know there are no guarantees [that she’ll make it onto an exchange list], but I really want to believe it will happen.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.Irina Novik for Bereg