Yulia Lemeshchenko was defiant and did not deny the accusations, saying she had decided to fight against Russian military aggression.
At the beginning of autumn 2023, Yulia Lemeshchenko stopped appearing at the Kharkiv gym where she trained most days. A driven athlete, whose talent for weightlifting led her to become champion of Ukraine in 2021, her disappearance prompted confusion among her training partners.
Months later, she resurfaced in a Moscow courtroom, accused of plotting sabotage and assassinations in Russia on behalf of the Ukrainian security services. Prosecutors claimed Lemeshchenko had blown up power lines outside St Petersburg and had later travelled to Voronezh, where she was staking out a Russian air force commander with a view to killing him.
She was sentenced this month to 19 years in prison. During the proceedings, she did not deny the accusations, but said her conscience was clear.
"Maybe I am making my position worse with my words, but my honour and conscience are more important to me. I did what I considered necessary," she said, in a short final word to the court, which was recorded and published on independent Russian news websites.
Russian authorities have systematically threatened, beaten and tortured Ukrainian prisoners of war and other detainees accused of working for Ukraine. This means that any alleged evidence, and all testimony obtained while under arrest in Russia, has to be treated with scepticism. However, Lemeshchenko's defiant statements suggested there may be some truth to the accusations in this case.
Lemeshchenko, 42, told the court about the horrible toll the Russian invasion had taken on the Kharkiv suburb where she had lived, and said friends of hers had died in the war. She said seeing the devastation had left her with the challenge of how to respond. "I don't think of myself as a cowardly or weak person, so I decided to fight against Russian military aggression," she told the court.
Lemeshchenko is a Russian citizen, born and raised in Voronezh, where she was arrested. She moved to Kharkiv with her husband and child in 2014, those who knew her said. She took up powerlifting, and soon realised she had a talent for it.
"She was driven, hard working, she trained hard and achieved real results," said Oleksandr Chernyshov, head of the Kharkiv branch of Ukraine's powerlifting federation.
In 2021, she won the Ukrainian championship. She wanted to compete internationally for Ukraine but first needed to obtain citizenship, which she was trying to do when Russia invaded in 2022. After the full-scale invasion, she remained in Kharkiv, even buying an apartment there. Chernyshov recounted how the Saltivka district where Lemeshchenko had lived was particularly badly hit, and how the death and destruction had made Lemeshchenko furious. He tried to help her as she again tried to obtain Ukrainian citizenship, but she could not clear the bureaucratic hurdles.
Then she simply disappeared. A few months later she called her trainer, Dmytro Pavlenko, on his birthday. "I asked her where she went, and she said: 'I'm in Kyiv; all is OK.' I asked: 'What's going on?' and she said: 'I'll explain everything later,'" Pavlenko recalled.
In a statement released after the verdict, Russia's FSB security agency claimed Lemeshchenko had volunteered to work for the Ukrainian services through a Telegram chatbot in autumn 2023, after which she had been contacted, recruited and then taken to Kyiv for training in weapons, drones and explosives.
"In August 2024, [she] was sent by the enemy to the city of Voronezh to carry out diversionary and terrorist acts against energy and transport infrastructure, as well as against personnel of the Russian ministry of defence," said the statement.
The agency also released video of Lemeshchenko making a confession and footage of explosive liquids, aerosols and burner phones allegedly found in her apartment. The Russian air force commander it was alleged she had been following was implicated in the bombing of Kharkiv.
Both the SBU security services and HUR military intelligence are believed to carry out diversionary activity and targeted assassinations on Russian soil. A number of Russian military figures have been killed in these attacks, most notably a general in charge of a chemical weapons unit who was killed by an exploding scooter as he left his apartment building.
Lemeshchenko's Russian passport would have been a valuable commodity for the Ukrainian security services, helping her to evade the checks and "filtration" to which Ukrainian citizens are subjected when entering Russia.
"I am not a citizen of the country for which I decided to fight, but nevertheless I consider Ukraine my home. I love the country; I love Kharkiv," she told the court.
Her old friends and trainers are left wondering whether to believe the Russian accusations. "Nobody expected this - absolutely nobody. It was a shock for us all," said Pavlenko. Initially, he said, he suspected a Russian set-up. Now he is not so sure. "I guess I already accept that, perhaps, this really did happen," he said.
Chernyshov, however, said he would not be surprised at all if the charges turned out to be true, and said her decisions were a positive example for Ukrainians. "Could she have been capable of it? Absolutely. She was one of those people who are capable of big feats. She was very pro-Ukrainian; more than some Ukrainians are. And she was as strong as a rock," he said.