New York, September 4, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Russian authorities to free Ukrainian journalist Heorhiy Levchenko, who has been sentenced to 16 years in a high security penal colony for treason and extremism.

“After capturing Ukrainian journalist Heorhiy Levchenko two years ago in retaliation for his brave reporting on the war from the occupied territories, Russian forces have now sentenced him to 16 years in jail in yet another example of their ruthless treatment of independent media,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Russian authorities should immediately release Levchenko and all other Ukrainian journalists.”

On September 2, a court in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied city of Melitopol, in Zaporizhzhia region, found Levchenko guilty of high treason and of calling for extremist activity online, on the grounds that he used a Telegram channel to give Ukrainian forces the location of Russian units.

Levchenko, who was the administrator of the Ukrainian news site RIA-Melitopol’s Telegram channel, also organized a network of correspondents who sent him information “containing calls for terrorism and violence against military personnel and representatives of the Russian authorities in the Zaporizhzhia region,” the court said.

Russian authorities detained Levchenko in August 2023, but this was not made public until Russian state-owned TV channel Rossiya 1’s Vesti Nedeli program broke the news two months later.

AnastasiyaGlukhovska, a former reporter with RIA-Melitopol, was detained on the same day and remains in custody.

Russia was the world’s fifth-worst jailer of journalists with 30 behind bars in CPJ’s latest annual prison census on December 1, 2024, 14 of whom were Ukrainian.

CPJ’s emails to the Russian court in Melitopol to request comment did not receive a reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.