The Voroshilovsky Interdistrict Court in Donetsk on Monday, 19 October, sentenced the blogger and lawyer Tetiana Montian (Tatyana Montyan) to a year and a half in a colony-settlement, plus a two-year ban on administering websites. The charge is Article 280(2) of the Russian criminal code: public calls to extremist activity, online. Forbes notes that the verdict, on the court’s site, has not entered into force. This is not a day of being locked up: lawyer Aleksei Kalugin told RIA Novosti she remains free, with a restriction on leaving her place of residence, until the verdict becomes final. The defence will appeal.

The Kyiv Independent calls the venue an “occupation court”. Donetsk is occupied Ukrainian territory; the trial ran under Russian law. The prosecutor had asked for five years in a colony-settlement and confiscation of an iPhone, Forbes writes citing RBC. Montian did not admit guilt. The defence asked for an acquittal, arguing the acts were wrongly classified.

The case starts from a December 2022 livestream. The court says she urged violent acts against a “social group”. She had spoken about the “okhranota” — regime loyalists who, in her telling, change their line to match their bosses — and said they should be “taken down without a shred of regret”. The Russian verb can also mean to kill. Montian said she meant banning accounts, not violence. That is her defence, not our finding.

Born in Kerch in 1972, she practised law in Ukraine, moved to Russia in 2021 and took Russian citizenship. She backed the aggression against Ukraine and spoke, in February 2022, at the UN Security Council at Moscow’s invitation. At the same time she criticised the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin and propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, accusing them of incompetence, not of having started the war.

In October 2026 she was put on Rosfinmonitoring’s list of people linked to terrorism and extremism. That is a Russian administrative list, not Monday’s verdict. In Ukraine the SBU has opened separate files, including for collaboration; those are not this trial. Meduza writes that the criminal inquiry became public with the list, after complaints channelled by Yekaterina Mizulina.

Monday’s closed act is the pronouncement: 18 months in a colony-settlement, a two-year website ban. It is not service of the sentence, not an appeal heard, not a jailing today. Headlines that say she “was jailed” skip what the lawyer said.

Image: the Kerch town sign, 18 August 2007, Pink floyd88 a, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The city of her birth, not the Donetsk courtroom and not a cell.

Sources consulted: Russian court jails pro-war blogger critical of Kremlin — The Kyiv Independent; A Russian court has sentenced blogger Tetyana Montian to 18 months — Meduza; Блогеру Монтян назначили 1,5 года колонии-поселения — Forbes.ru; Донецкий суд приговорил Татьяну Монтян к полутора годам за призывы к экстремизму — RIA Novosti.