When a Russian court handed down a 12-year prison sentence on Thursday, the defendant was not even permitted to sit in the room for most of her own trial. Maria Bontsler, a 66-year-old defence attorney known for representing political dissidents, was convicted of state treason inside the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad.
Prosecutors claimed she passed sensitive information to Ukraine, an accusation her legal team firmly rejected. The sentence shows how dangerous it has become to defend political prisoners in Russia, where the legal system increasingly treats defence work itself as an act of subversion.
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The accusations against Maria Bontsler
Bontsler spent years taking on cases that few other attorneys in Kaliningrad would touch. The region sits along the Baltic Sea, cut off from mainland Russia and wedged between Lithuania and Poland. According to the legal aid organisation Slovo Zashchite, Bontsler represented numerous clients facing state prosecution for political offences.
A court statement published on Telegram did not name Bontsler directly, but confirmed the conviction of a local figure arrested by the FSB intelligence agency. Investigators alleged that beginning in 2024, she gathered and transferred details to Ukrainian contacts regarding local security personnel. State prosecutors also claimed she shared information about open criminal investigations that were of interest to officials in Kyiv.
Prosecutors had pushed for a 15-year term. Instead, the judge ordered 12 years in a penal colony, followed by an additional year of strict limits on her personal movement and professional activity.
A trial conducted behind locked doors
The proceedings took place in complete secrecy. Slovo Zashchite reported that authorities barred both Maria Bontsler and her legal team from attending the substantive hearings. Court officials brought her in only at the very end to deliver a final statement.
Her defence lawyers stressed that none of the files or facts she handled were state secrets. They pointed out that the material came from standard legal practice and public records. The team also raised alarms over her physical condition, noting that her health suffered severe decline during months of pretrial detention.
Growing pressure on Russian defence lawyers
Russian authorities have steadily tightened their grip on independent counsel since launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Early wartime legislation banned any public actions said to discredit the military and outlawed what the state defines as false news about the armed forces.
Those laws quickly expanded from silencing street protesters to sidelining the attorneys who defend them. In January 2025, judges handed down prison sentences ranging from three and a half to five and a half years to three lawyers who had represented the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny on extremism charges. That decision sent a blunt warning through the legal community.
With Maria Bontsler now facing more than a decade in prison, independent representation for dissenters in isolated border regions like Kaliningrad has nearly disappeared. Her defence team plans to file an appeal against the closed-door ruling in the regional court.
Source: Al Jazeera
