Evghenia Gutul, the jailed head of Moldova’s autonomous Gagauzia region, has published a collection of letters written from her prison cell, releasing the book as a court in Chișinău prepares to rule on her appeal against a seven-year sentence.
The book, The Gutul Case. Anatomy of Political Persecution, gathers 30 letters and can be downloaded free in English, Turkish and Russian at www.egutul.com, according to a statement from her supporters. In it Gutul casts her arrest and trial as political repression and addresses the European Parliament, independent journalists and the people of Gagauzia, a mainly Russian-speaking region in southern Moldova that has long leaned towards Moscow.
Gutul was elected Bashkan, or head, of Gagauzia in 2023 as a candidate of the Șor party, which Moldovan authorities banned that year. She was detained in March 2025 and, on August 5, 2025, a court in the capital, Chișinău, sentenced her to seven years in prison.
Prosecutors said she had funnelled undeclared money from Russia between 2019 and 2022 to finance the party, founded by Ilan Șor, a businessman convicted of fraud who lives in exile. The court also ordered Gutul to forfeit 40.9 million lei (about €2 million) that investigators said had been used illegally. Prosecutors, who had sought nine years, did not appeal.
Gutul has denied wrongdoing and called the case politically motivated, describing the original verdict as a blow to democracy. Her lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, told the Russian state broadcaster RT the prosecution amounted to “lawfare”, and in the statement from her supporters he called the letters “ready-made evidence of political repression in Moldova”.
The conviction came weeks before parliamentary elections in September 2025, in which President Maia Sandu, who has steered the former Soviet republic towards the West, sought to keep her majority. Moldova is an official candidate for European Union membership.
The Chișinău Court of Appeal is due to give its decision today. If it upholds the sentence, the ruling becomes enforceable and Gutul could be removed as head of Gagauzia, her lawyer Sergei Moraru told the TASS news agency. The court could in theory cut the sentence or free her, though her supporters expect the term to be confirmed.
In the letters, Gutul also writes about being separated from her two sons, the youngest aged three, and about the strain of solitary confinement, according to her supporters. In one she wrote that she would not surrender her mandate, saying: “I will not give in.” She has urged her compatriots and international institutions to keep watching events in the region.
