Kuzmina Polina Nikolaevna (Kuzmina Polina Mikolayivna)

In Severomorsk, Murmansk Region, on May 30, 2024, 53-year-old local resident Vladimir Grabovetsky was detained. Later, on July 2, 2025, 48-year-old Ukrainian citizen Polina Kuzmina was detained in Moscow. On that day, she was supposed to take the oath to receive Russian citizenship. After her detention, she was flown by military aircraft to Severomorsk. The man was charged with state treason, and the woman with complicity in state treason.

According to the investigation, Grabovetsky planned to provide material assistance to the Armed Forces and Security Service of Ukraine, for which he recruited Polina Kuzmina, a Ukrainian citizen who had the ability to transfer money to Ukrainian territory through relatives. From December 2022 to May 2024, the defendants made 78 transfers.

Polina herself stated that before her arrest, she had worked for 12 years caring for elderly and low-mobility people. She had a list of clients to whom she helped transfer money to various accounts through a publicly accessible online exchange service. One of her clients asked her to transfer money to his brother in Ukraine; the Russian investigation considered these transfers as assistance to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. According to the woman, she had never seen this client, nor did she know how his relatives in Ukraine used the money, and there was no hint in their correspondence of any assistance to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The court placed Grabovetsky and Kuzmina in pretrial detention.

On September 29, 2025, the Murmansk Regional Court found the defendants guilty and sentenced Polina Kuzmina to 12 years in a general-regime penal colony and a fine of 400,000 rubles. Vladimir Grabovetsky was sentenced to 14 years in a strict-regime penal colony.

On February 9, 2026, the Second Appellate Court of General Jurisdiction upheld the verdict without change.