Iryna Danylovych is a nurse, well-known trade union activist and citizen journalist in Crimea. As a medical worker, she reported on the problems of the health system in Crimea, including breaches in the payment of medical staff during the coronavirus. Iryna Danylovych cooperated with many independent media and developed her own information project about crimean medicine. In 2020, she began fighting for her colleagues' rights at the trade union level: she became the head of the Crimean branch of the Alliance of Doctors trade union.

Already before, Iryna Danylovych had come to the attention of the law enforcement agencies of the Russian Federation as an activist of the Ukrainian Cultural Centre: in 2015, the Centre opened a small branch of the library in Feodosia, and Iryna was in charge of it. In this capacity, she repeatedly gave interviews to the publication 'Krym.Realii' and spoke about her love for Ukraine. The country was her choice: when Iryna was five, her family moved from Belarus to Crimea. As an adult, after graduating from the medical university in Crimea, Iryna lived in Russia for a while, then in Belarus, but decided to return to Crimea. On the eve of the peninsula's annexation by Russia, Iryna obtained a Ukrainian passport just before the so-called referendum, after which the Crimean peninsula was occupied.

In 2016, Iryna was first detained at the entrance to Crimea from mainland Ukraine. Danylovych and two other activists from the Ukrainian Cultural Centre were questioned by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). In 2017, the FSB officers again showed interest in Iryna. She was summoned without a subpoena, pressured and intimidated that they would recognise her Ukrainian passport as illegal, and tried to get Iryna to denounce them. The FSB officers were interested in Crimean Tatars who were acquaintances of Danylovych and whom they considered disloyal to the Russian Federation.

On 29 April 2022, FSB officers abducted Iryna Danylovych at a bus stop in Koktebel as she was returning home from work. Family and friends, unaware of Danylovych's fate, tried in vain to locate her in various places of detention, until two weeks later they were informed that she was in Simferopol's pre-trial detention centre. It later emerged that the activist had been held in the basement of the FSB department, interrogated, threatened and forced to confess to high treason and collaboration with the SBU. She later told the court that after the agents failed to force her to make the necessary statement, 200 grams of explosives were placed in her eyeglass case.

In the summer of 2024, Iryna's father, who had reported his daughter's condition to society, died.