The defendants in the “Kherson Nine” case were detained in the summer of 2022, when Kherson was still under Russian occupation. They were charged with plotting assassinations of collaborationist officials in the city. In January 2026, a Russian court sentenced them to between 14 and 20 years in prison.

Five years into the war, that dry summary sounds almost routine. But the Kherson Nine case is a textbook example of how the FSB catches Ukrainian “terrorists”: abductions with bags over the suspects’ heads, staged operational footage, confessions as the primary evidence of guilt — and torture so severe that one of the suspects died before he could even be “officially” arrested.

The case was reported by Mediazona, which followed it for two years. Meduza retells the story here.

Note: This article contains explicit language and descriptions of torture.

Who makes up the ‘Kherson Nine’ — and what they allegedly did (the prosecution’s account)

In the spring of 2022, officers of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) — among them one Samir Shukyurov — formed a “terrorist organization” in Russian-occupied Kherson. Shukyurov recruited businessman Kostiantyn Reznyk and Reznyk’s subordinate Serhiy Kabakov, tasking them with assassinating the deputy head of the Kherson occupation administration, former Ukrainian parliament member Oleksiy Kovalev.

The plan called for an explosive device to be attached to a pier on the Dnipro River, from which Kovalev regularly commuted to work by jet ski. Serhiy Heydt, a fishing production manager, and his acquaintance Vasyl Stetsenko, an environmental inspector — both recruited by Reznyk and Kabakov — carried out the attempt. The device failed to detonate.

Shukyurov also approached a retired Ukrainian serviceman, Serhiy Kovalsky, and tasked him with blowing up a car and killing two other deputy heads of the Kherson occupation administration: Vitaly Bulyuk and Kirill Stremousov. At Kovalsky’s request, his first cousin Serhiy Ofitserov, a merchandise inspector, began tracking Bulyuk’s vehicle. That attempt also failed, for technical reasons.

Around the same time, two former Ukrainian civil servants — Oleh Bohdanov and Yuriy Tavozhnyansky — were recruited in Kherson. Bohdanov brought components for a homemade explosive device from Mykolaiv; Reznyk later collected them. Tavozhnyansky received money from his acquaintance Shukyurov to fund the assassination plots and passed it on to Reznyk.

The final two defendants are Red Cross volunteer Yuriy Kayev and his acquaintance, former Ukrainian contract soldier Denys Lyalka. The two assembled a bomb and concealed it in a cache, from which Kovalsky retrieved it to use against Stremousov. Russia’s Federal Security Service thwarted the assassination. Stremousov — like Kovalev — was killed later, after the defendants had already been detained.

The defendants were tortured in a Kherson basement for two months. One of them died there.

The detention — or rather, the abduction — of the defendants followed the same script each time: seized at home or on the street, sometimes in front of their children, bags pulled over their heads, driven to the former headquarters of Ukraine’s National Police on Lutheranska Street in Kherson. There they were thrown into a basement that had been converted into a torture chamber, where they were held for several months.

Serhiy Heydt was among the first to be detained, on July 19, 2022. In the basement on Lutheranska Street, he found a dying man he recognized as Vasyl Stetsenko. Stetsenko, like Heydt, had endured electric shocks and beatings for several days. Witnesses said that from the pain and thirst he had “stopped thinking straight,” drank his own urine, and “couldn’t control himself, couldn’t stand up.”

Stetsenko died on August 3. Denys Lyalka, detained around the same time, saw a body in a bag outside the basement on Lutheranska Street. “Later they told me that was Vasyl,” Lyalka told the court. “The officers who were escorting me were also talking about some Vasyl — saying something like, ‘There were supposed to be ten of you, but one is already dead, this Vasya here, we don’t know what to do with him.’” The whereabouts of Stetsenko’s body remain unknown.

Electric shock torture cost Lyalka several teeth. Serhiy Ofitserov had his ribs broken during an interrogation, after which he was handcuffed to a cell grate and left there for six days. Heydt endured the same treatment for ten days. “They come once every three days, give you something to drink, and that’s it,” he recalled. He also said that Kostiantyn Reznyk suffered a heart attack after one of the beatings, but no ambulance was called.

The basement was run by men in plainclothes — confirmed at trial to be FSB officers. They fed the prisoners rarely and sparingly; Yuriy Kayev lost 25 kilograms (55 pounds) in two months. Each cell received one liter (about one quart) of water per day, though sometimes that supply had to last several days. When prisoners were not being beaten or subjected to electric shocks, they were tormented in other ways: subjected to mock executions, or woken by shouts of “Glory to Ukraine!” to which they were required to respond: ”…as part of the Russian Federation!”

Children were among the prisoners. An 11-year-old boy spent several weeks in Kayev’s cell in the fall of 2022, detained on suspicion of passing coordinates to the SBU, Kayev said. A 14-year-old teenager spent about two weeks in another cell, Lyalka said: “They made him kick his acquaintance in the head. He was crying hard and kicking.” Another prisoner kept a diary in which he wrote that he heard a child’s voice from one of the cells: “By the sound of it, he’s about 10 to 12. This is fucked up!”

The defendants signed confessions before the ‘official arrest.’ They didn’t even know what they were signing.

As the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona has noted, the Kherson Nine case rests entirely on the defendants’ own testimony. They signed those statements in late September 2022, while still held in the basement on Lutheranska Street — after two months of torture and under threats that their relatives would be abducted. Reznyk said security officials once drove him to his pregnant daughter’s home and ordered him to “choose.” “Well, I chose to sign everything,” he said.

Neither Reznyk nor any of the other defendants could see what they were signing: the text of their statements was covered by another sheet of paper.

They were also compelled to participate in staged investigative measures, footage from which later aired on the program Vesti Nedeli on the Rossiya 1 channel. FSB officers drove the Kherson residents to their homes or other locations, told them where to stand and how to move, and filmed everything. On one such outing, Kovalsky was handed back his phone solely so officers could film a staged scene of its seizure. Kayev was led into a room containing weapons and forced to handle them so he would leave fingerprints.

The criminal case file also describes a phone call conducted as part of a “sting operation.” During the call, Kostiantyn Reznyk and Serhiy Kabakov told their interlocutor — supposedly SBU officer Samir Shukyurov — that they had some “junk” they needed to get rid of, because they were already “looking over their shoulders at old ladies.” At trial, Reznyk and Kabakov said FSB officers had simply forced them to recite a pre-memorized script at gunpoint.

October 6, 2022 was designated as the day of the “official detention” of the Kherson residents — even though they had been brought to the basement on Lutheranska Street between late July and early August. It was only on that date that they were supposedly arrested, and in Simferopol at that, not in Kherson. The first document in their criminal case file was a report by FSB Captain Anton Grishchenko, whose name had appeared in high-profile criminal cases from Russian-occupied Crimea.

‘We’re the ones doing time here. But you and your children have to live here.’ How the trial unfolded.

The Kherson Nine case was heard by Judge Kirill Krivtsov of the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don. Once the trial began and defense lawyers entered the case, the defendants withdrew their confessions and reported the torture. Defense lawyers demanded that a criminal case be opened for abuse of authority. The Russian federal investigating authority refused, stating that the FSB officers denied the torture. The investigating authority did not interview the victims.

At one court session, an anonymous witness identified as “Ivanov” testified that he had led the detention of the Kherson residents but denied that any torture or fabrication of evidence had taken place. “No. Of course not,” “Ivanov” said when asked whether he or his subordinates had taken part in the beatings. As the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona reported, laughter broke out from the defendants’ dock at that moment. The defendants said they recognized “Ivanov” by his voice as an FSB officer with the call sign “Khmury” (“Gloomy”), who had been in charge in the basement on Lutheranska Street and had personally participated in the torture.

Defense lawyers demanded that FSB operatives who had worked in Kherson in the summer of 2022 be summoned for questioning, along with the witnesses whose names appeared in the procedural records; they also proposed examining phone billing records, security camera footage, and metadata from photographs in the case file. The judge denied all of these motions. The defense argued that testimony obtained under torture should be inadmissible, and that a Russian court had no right to try Ukrainian citizens — arguments the judge ignored.

“There is a wonderful saying: ‘To some, war is a mother.’ Now we understand who it’s a mother to — FSB officers, who can do whatever they want, and then the war will cover it all up. This is wrong, it should not be this way. If we have even a shred of respect for the state whose citizens we are, we must not allow such things. We cannot allow this disgraceful lawlessness. It shames my country, of which I am a citizen,” one of the defense lawyers said in court.

“We’re the ones doing time here. But you and your children have to live here,” defendant Kostiantyn Reznyk said in his final statement.