A Russian military court on Tuesday sentenced a Ukrainian filmmaker to 20 years in a prison colony on terror charges in a trial condemned by Kiev, Western rights groups and top film directors.
Oleg Sentsov, 39, was convicted of masterminding arson attacks on pro-Kremlin party offices in Crimea after Russia seized the peninsula from Ukraine in March last year, and for plotting further attacks, including a scheme to blow up a statue of Lenin in the largest Crimean city, Simferopol.
His fellow Ukrainian defendant Alexander Kolchenko, a 25-year-old activist who also opposed Russia’s annexation of Crimea, was sentenced to 10 years after he too was found guilty of taking part in the attacks.
Photo: AFP
Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a bitter feud over Moscow’s takeover of Crimea and its support for the ongoing pro-Russian insurgency in eastern Ukraine.
Sentsov defiantly flicked a victory sign and he and Kolchenko sang the Ukrainian national anthem inside their glass enclosure following the verdict at a court in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
“Hold on, Oleg. The time will come when those who organized the trial against you will find themselves in the dock,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Twitter.
The two men, who have been held in Russia since May last year, were tried as Russians, despite never having applied for citizenship.
Sentsov’s lawyer Dmitry Dinze said his client would appeal the sentence, which was delivered at one of the only two Russian military courts authorized to hear terrorism cases.
“It’s the height of injustice and lawlessness,” Russia’s TASS state news agency quoted Dinze as saying.
The sentence was condemned by a variety of Western officials, film directors and international organizations.
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini criticized the trial as in “breach of international law and elementary standards of justice.”
The US also condemned Sentsov’s jailing and called for Russia to immediately release him and Kolchenko.
“This is a clear miscarriage of justice,” US Department of State spokesman John Kirby said.
Amnesty International called the long sentences a “blatant injustice after a patently unfair trial marred by credible allegations of torture.”
Acclaimed filmmakers from across the globe, including Spain’s Pedro Almodovar and Britain’s Mike Leigh, have written to Russian President Vladimir Putin expressing concern over Sentsov’s prosecution.
Russian film director Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose latest film Leviathan won a Golden Globe, wrote in a letter published in the Novaya Gazeta newspaper on Monday that it was “monstrous to jail a young man who is a promising filmmaker.”
Zvyagintsev had called for Russia to “either release him or only try him for what you can prove irrefutably.”
Sentsov had his debut feature Gamer shown at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2012.
In custody, Sentsov was beaten and threatened with rape and murder and was “suffocated to the point of fainting” with a plastic bag over his head, Dinze said in October last year.
Investigators refused to open a probe, saying bruises on the filmmaker’s back and legs were because he had taken part in sado-masochistic sex before his arrest, the lawyer said.
Defense lawyers said witnesses were tortured to produce testimony implicating the pair in activities involving Ukrainian far-right organization Right Sector, which is banned in Russia.
Two alleged accomplices have already been jailed for seven years after confessing, but both refused to testify as prosecution witnesses in Sentsov’s trial, with one saying he had earlier given testimony under duress.
In his final trial statement, the up-and-coming filmmaker condemned Moscow’s rule.
“Your propaganda is very good, but there are also people like you who understand very well that there are no fascists in Ukraine, that Crimea was taken illegally and that your troops are in Donbass,” he said of the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine.
Sentsov and Kolchenko are among 11 Ukrainians held in Russian prisons whom Kiev considers to be political prisoners, according to Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Pavlo Klimkin.
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