“It’s godless”. Retired teacher from occupied Ukraine jailed for 12 years over alleged plot after taking in “homeless” man later identified as Ukrainian officer

The teacher, Valentina Zayarnaya, was found guilty of participating in a terrorist organisation, attempting to store explosives and preparing a terrorist attack. The prosecution had sought a 20-year sentence, as well as a fine of 500,000 roubles; Zayarnaya did not admit guilt. 

A second defendant, Denis Storozhuk, a lieutenant colonel in Ukraine’s border guard service, was tried in the same case but is now in Ukraine, having returned in a prisoner exchange in fall 2024. He was sentenced in absentia to 22 years in a maximum security penal colony and fined 600,000 roubles.

The prosecution alleged that Zayarnaya and Storozhuk planned an attack on Yaroslav Anika, a deputy in the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, the Kremlin-backed separatist entity that Moscow later annexed. According to the indictment, the pair monitored Anika’s movements and intended to plant an explosive device in his car. Ukrainian intelligence services, prosecutors said, supplied Storozhuk with a parcel containing explosives and a forged passport, while Zayarnaya collected the package from a prearranged location in Donetsk at his request.

In court, the prosecution acknowledged that the explosive material had been replaced with a dummy before Zayarnaya picked it up, and that the charges were adjusted accordingly. Prosecutors also removed an aggravating element from the case, conceding that investigators had not established that the alleged attack was motivated by Anika’s official status.

Much of the trial, however, focused not on the mechanics of the alleged plot but on how Zayarnaya became involved at all. As Mediazona has previously reported, she first knew Storozhuk before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and did not know his real identity. When he arrived at her home in the summer of 2022, “Dima” claimed his house had burned down during the fighting for Mariupol. He did not say that he was a senior Ukrainian border guard officer, nor that he had barely avoided capture in Azovstal.

In May 2022, after weeks of siege, Ukrainian forces defending the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol surrendered to Russian troops. The vast industrial complex with its bunkers and underground tunnels became a focal point of the war. Storozhuk did not surrender with the rest of the garrison; instead, he spent nearly three weeks hiding in tunnels before emerging into Russian-controlled territory and making his way to Zayarnaya’s home.

Zayarnaya, a former teacher of English and German from the town of Amvrosiivka, told the court she took him in out of sympathy and affection, later describing him as “an adopted son”. He lived in her house for almost a year.

She was arrested in March 2023 while collecting the parcel in Donetsk. Security officers then took her back to her home and waited for Storozhuk to appear. He hid in a shed and later said he watched through a window as armed men threatened her at gunpoint. Both were eventually detained, and their joint case reached court in March 2024.

During the hearings, Zayarnaya pushed back hard against Storozhuk’s later public claims about what he had been doing while living under her roof. After his return to Ukraine, he gave an interview in which he said he had been gathering information on Russian military targets and passing it to Ukrainian intelligence so that “a missile would hit the right location”. Zayarnaya told the court she did not believe “50%” of what he said, and dismissed his account as bragging. “Dima is prone to exaggeration, he likes showing off, like any man, he puffed his tail up and talks about what a hero he is,” she said. She also rejected his claim that he went out at night, insisting she would have heard because her dog would have barked at any movement. 

Zayarnaya described the moment of her arrest in emotional terms, saying she had been threatened at gunpoint while the officer watched from hiding rather than intervening. When prosecutors asked for a 20-year sentence during closing arguments, she responded in court: “It’s godless. It will be on your conscience.”