A Ukrainian court has sentenced British military instructor Ross David Cutmore to eight and a half years in a maximum-security prison after finding that he passed highly classified battlefield intelligence to the Russian Federal Security Service.

Cutmore, 56, a native of Dunfermline, Scotland, appeared before the Kyivskyi District Court of Odesa and finalized a plea agreement with state prosecutors before pleading guilty, according to the case details. He had arrived in Ukraine in January 2024 to provide firearms and tactical combat training to newly mobilized Ukrainian personnel.

By autumn 2024, Cutmore had stopped teaching and relocated to Odesa. He was arrested in October 2025, after investigators said he had been systematically harvesting sensitive operational data from secure communication channels used by foreign military instructors training frontline units.

The Security Service of Ukraine said Cutmore was drawn into pro-Kremlin online networks during a period of severe personal financial distress and was later recruited by an operative of the Russian Federal Security Service. Prosecutors said he funneled battlefield intelligence to Russian handlers, and the security service said he had also received preliminary instructions to prepare a series of coordinated terrorist attacks inside Ukrainian cities.

The case lands in the middle of a wider problem for ukraine, which relies heavily on foreign military volunteers and instructors while Russian intelligence services target them for recruitment and compromise. Ukrainian authorities have already tightened vetting for foreign nationals, but this prosecution shows how high the risk remains for anyone working near the front line. For Cutmore, the plea deal has now converted the case from allegation to conviction, and the sentence leaves little doubt about how seriously Kyiv is treating the breach.