Oksana Sevastidi, a 46-year-old shopkeeper from the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, is serving a seven-year prison sentence for high treason. As RFE/RL reports: 'Sevastidi was arrested by the Krasnodar branch of the FSB in January 2015. She spent 14 months in pretrial detention, during which time prosecutors questioned her only twice. Her own defense attorney never visited her.' RFE/RL notes that, while Sevastidi was convicted and sentenced in March 2016, her case only became widely known this month when desperate relatives contacted the Memorial human rights organization for help appealing the court's ruling, and Memorial engaged the human rights lawyer Ivan Pavlov, the leading member of the informal association of lawyers Team 29 based in St. Petersburg, to act in her defence. According to RFE/RL: 'Sevastidi was convicted of sending two SMS messages in the first half of 2008 that the Russian government argued contained secret information about military movements in the direction of the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia. Russia and Georgia fought a brief war over Abkhazia and a second Georgian region, South Ossetia, in August 2008, after which Moscow recognized both regions as independent. Sevastidi still cannot quite believe what happened at her trial, which was held in the basement of the local Federal Security Service (FSB) branch under tight secrecy.' 

In an interview with the website Meduza, published on December 5, Oksana Sevastidi said: "The prosecutor didn't let me say a word in my own defense. Everything was done in one day: the arguments, the concluding statements, and the sentence. It was all very fast and mixed up, like in a dream. And as if through a shroud, I heard the words 'seven years.'" [Translation by RFE/RL]'Жительницу Сочи приговорили к колонии за СМС о военной технике накануне войны с Грузией,' Memorial Human Rights Centre, 2 December 2016