A former staff member of an international monitoring mission in eastern Ukraine was convicted of spying by a court in the Moscow-occupied Donetsk, the Russian prosecutor general’s office said Friday.
Vadym Golda — who was a security assistant for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s monitoring mission — was sentenced to 16 years in prison for his alleged crime which involved gathering information about industrial facilities, a statement by the Russian office said.
The information was gathered in 2021, before the start of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, the statement added. Some of the facilities came under attack in the war.
Golda was detained in September 2022 along with two other mission workers, both of whom were earlier sentenced to 13 years in prison.