The defendants in the “Kherson Nine” case were detained in the summer of 2022, when Kherson was still occupied by Russia. They were accused of preparing assassination attempts on collaborating officials in Kherson. In January 2026, a Russian court sentenced them to prison terms ranging from 14 to 20 years.
In the fifth year of the war, this dry report seems ordinary. But the case of the “Kherson Nine” is an illustrative example of how the FSB arrests Ukrainian “terrorists.” It presents a kidnapping with a bag over his head, filming the operations, and the confession as the main evidence of guilt – and the torture, due to which one of the suspects lived not only to trial, but even to “formal arrest.”
About “Kherson Nine” He said Mediazona, which has been following this case for two years. “Medusa” retells this material.
attention! This text contains obscene language and descriptions of torture.
Who is part of the “Kherson Nine”? And what did these people do?
In the spring of 2022, Ukrainian Security Service officers – in particular Samir Shukurov – created a “terrorist community” in occupied Kherson. Shukurov recruited a businessman to join him Konstantin Reznik And his subordinate Sergey Kabakov. They received instructions to blow up the deputy head of the Kherson occupation administration, former deputy of the Ukrainian parliament, Alexei Kovalev.
The explosive device was planned to be installed on a pier on the Dnieper River, where Kovalev often went to work on a jet ski. The head of fishing production tried to do this Sergey Geidt And his friend, the environmental inspection employee Vasyl StetsenkoWhich was found by Reznik and Kabakov. But there was no explosion: the device did not work.
Shukurov also contacted a retired Ukrainian military man Sergey KovalskyHe ordered him to blow up a car and kill two more deputy heads of the Kherson occupation administration – Vitaly Bulyuk and Kirill Stremosov. At Kovaleski’s request, Pollyuk’s car was monitored by his cousin, a commodities expert. Sergey Ovitserov. But the explosion failed again for technical reasons.
Meanwhile, two former Ukrainian civil servants were recruited in Kherson – Oleg Bogdanov and Yuri Tavoznyansky. Bogdanov brought from Nikolaev the components of an explosive device, which Reznik later took, and Tavoznyansky received money from his friend Shukirov to organize the assassination attempts and handed them over to Reznik.
The last two defendants in the case are Red Cross volunteers Yuri Kaif His friend is a former contract soldier in the Ukrainian Armed Forces Denis Lyalka. They collected the bomb and put it in a bunker. Kowalski then took her to kill Stremosov. The Federal Security Service thwarted the assassination attempt. Stremosov (like Kovalev) died later, after the defendants in the case were arrested.
The defendants in the case were tortured for two months in a Kherson basement. One of them died there
The detention, or rather their kidnapping, of the defendants in the case followed the same scenario: they were arrested at home or on the street (someone right in front of the children), a bag was placed over their heads and they were taken to the building of the former headquarters of the National Police of Ukraine in Kherson on Luthranska Street. There they were thrown into a basement and turned into a torture chamber, where they were held for several months.
Sergei Gedit was one of the first arrested. This happened on July 19, 2022. In the basement of Lutheranskaya, he saw a dying man, whom he recognized as Vasily Stetsenko. Like Geidt himself, he was tortured with electric shocks and beaten for several days. According to eyewitnesses, he “stopped thinking” due to pain and thirst, drank his own urine and “walked around and could not get up.”
On August 3, Stetsenko died. Denis Lyalka, who was arrested on the same days, saw a body in a suitcase in front of the basement on Lotranska Street. “Later they told me it was Vasily. The staff who took me out also talked about some Vasily. There were supposed to be ten of you, but one is already a corpse, this is Vasya, we don’t know what to do with him,” Lyalka said in court. The location of Stetsenko’s body remains unknown.
Lyalka as a result of torturing part of her teeth with electric shock. Sergei Ovitserov suffered two broken ribs during interrogation, then was handcuffed to the bars of his cell and left there for six days. For Haidt, the same torture lasted ten days. “They come once every three days, give me something to drink, and that’s about it,” Geidt recalls. He also said that Konstantin Reznik had a heart attack after another beating, but that an ambulance had not been called for him.
There were people in civilian clothes in command downstairs; It will be confirmed in court that they were FSB officers. They rarely fed the prisoners poorly (Yuri Kaif lost 25 kilograms in two months). The cell was given a liter of water a day, but sometimes it had to be extended over several days. When the prisoners were not beaten or tortured with electric shocks, they were mocked in a different way – they imitated execution or were awakened by shouts of “Glory to Ukraine,” to which they had to respond “…as part of the Russian Federation!”
There were children among the prisoners. According to Kaif, in the fall of 2022, an 11-year-old boy sat in his cell for several weeks and was arrested for allegedly resetting the coordinates of the State Security Service. A 14-year-old teenager spent about two weeks in another cell. “They forced him to kick his friend in the head. He cried and hit him a lot,” Lyalka said. Another prisoner wrote downstairs noteI heard the voice of a child in one of the cells: “He is 10 to 12 years old, judging by his voice. This is ridiculous!”
The defendants signed confessions before “official arrest.” They didn’t even know what they were signing
As Mediazona emphasizes, the “Kherson Nine” case is based entirely on the testimony of the accused. They signed these statements at the end of September 2022, still in the basement on Lotharanskaya Street – after two months of torture and under the threat of kidnapping of their relatives. Reznick said that one day security forces brought him to the house of his daughter, who was pregnant at that moment, and ordered him to “choose.” “Well, I chose to sign everything,” he said.
At the same time, neither Reznik nor the other defendants in the case saw what they were signing: the text of their testimony was covered by another sheet of paper.
They also had to participate in phased operational search activities, footage of which later appeared in the “News of the Week” program on the “Russia 1” channel. FSB officers brought Kherson residents to their homes or somewhere else, showed them where to stand and how to move, and then filmed it on video. On one of these trips, Kovaleski’s phone was returned to film the seizure scene. Kaif was taken to a room containing a weapon and forced to pick it up so he could leave fingerprints on it.
The criminal case also describes a phone call as part of a “practical experiment.” During the call, Konstantin Reznik and Sergei Kabakov admitted to their interlocutor (allegedly a Ukrainian Security Service officer Samir Shkurov) that they had “nonsense” to get rid of, because they were already “looking at old women.” In court, Reznik and Kabakov stated that FSB officers simply forced them to read a previously memorized text at gunpoint.
October 6, 2022 became the day of “official detention” of Kherson residents (although they were transferred to the basement in Lotharanska from the end of July to the beginning of August). At that time, they were allegedly detained in Simferopol, not in Kherson. The first document in their criminal case was the report of FSB Captain Anton Grishchenko, whose name has appeared in high-profile criminal cases in annexed Crimea.
“We should sit here. You and your children can live here.” How did the trial go?
The case of the “Kherson Nine” was heard by the judge of the Military Court of the Southern District in Rostov-on-Don, Kirill Krivtsov. After the trial began and lawyers appeared in the case, the defendants withdrew their confessions and announced that they had been subjected to torture. The lawyers demanded the opening of a criminal case on charges of abuse of power. The Investigative Committee rejected this, saying that FSB officers denied torture. The investigation committee did not conduct interviews with the victims.
In one of the court sessions, the secret witness, “Ivanov,” spoke. He said he supervised the arrest of Kherson residents, but denied torture and falsifying evidence. “No, of course not,” Ivanov answered when asked whether he or his subordinates participated in the beating. As Mediazona wrote, at that moment laughter was heard from the “aquarium” along with the accused. The defendants stated that through his voice they recognized “Ivanov” as an officer in the Federal Security Service with the call sign “Khamuri,” and he was in charge of the basement in Lutheranskaya. According to them, he supervised the beatings and personally participated in the torture.
The lawyers demanded that FSB agents who worked in Kherson in the summer of 2022 be summoned for interrogation, and that the witnesses named in the protocols offered to investigate phone bills, recordings from surveillance cameras and photo metadata from the case materials – the judge rejected all these requests. The defenders insisted that testimonies obtained under torture should not be taken into account, and that the Russian court had no right to try Ukrainian citizens at all – the judge ignored these arguments.
“There is such a wonderful saying: ‘For whom is war, but to whom is the mother dear?’ Now we understand who the mother is – FSB employees who can do whatever they want, and then the war will write off everything. This is wrong, it should not be this way. If we respect even a little the state of which we are citizens, we should not allow such things to happen. We cannot allow such shameful lawlessness. This is a shame for the country of which I am a citizen,” said one of the lawyers in court.
In his final speech, accused Konstantin Reznik said: “My dears, we should sit here. You and your children can live here.”