The lawyer who defended Russians accused of treason is jailed for 12 years for treason, after a trial she was barred from

Maria Bontsler spent decades defending people in some of Russia’s hardest political cases. On Thursday a court in Kaliningrad, Russia’s Baltic exclave between Poland and Lithuania, sentenced her to 12 years in a penal colony for treason, followed by a further year of restrictions on her activity.

Prosecutors had asked for 15 years. The court’s own statement on the sentence did not name her; the legal rights project Slovo Zashchite, which reported the verdict, did.

What is she accused of?

Prosecutors said that from 2024 she passed information to Ukrainian intelligence about Federal Security Service (FSB) officers in Kaliningrad who investigated espionage, treason and terrorism cases, along with details of criminal cases in the exclave that interested Kyiv. They allege she gathered that information while representing defendants in those very cases.

Bontsler denied the charges. Her lawyers said none of the information was secret: all of it, they argued, was public and had been disclosed in open court.

She was detained by the FSB in Kaliningrad in May, first on a charge of “confidential cooperation with a foreign state”. The charge was later upgraded to treason.

What kind of trial was it?

A closed one. Slovo Zashchite said Bontsler and her lawyers were prevented from attending hearings and she was allowed to speak only in a closing statement. In it she told the court her prosecution was retaliation for her human rights work.

The group said her health was poor in detention. She reported several health problems during the trial, including a cardiac arrest, and said she did not get adequate treatment.

Why does this case stand out?

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has also made it a crime to “discredit” the army or spread what the state calls fake news about the military.

What sets this case apart is who is in the dock. Bontsler had represented several people accused of political offences in Kaliningrad. If information that came out in open court can be treated as state secrets when a defence lawyer shares it, the risk now falls on every lawyer who takes these cases, and on every defendant who needs one.

At 66, a 12-year term would keep her in a penal colony until she is well into her 70s.

Does it matter outside Russia?

Kaliningrad sits inside the European Union’s borders, wedged between NATO members Poland and Lithuania, and is one of the most heavily militarised parts of Russia. A case built on information about the security officers who work there will be read in Warsaw, Vilnius and Kyiv as a signal of how tightly Moscow is policing the exclave. No foreign government had publicly responded to the sentence when this story was written.