The occupiers are so monotonous in their crimes that their trends can be traced with the naked eye. If earlier we talked about the massive trend of illegal, politically motivated convictions and persecution, now we see a tendency to fabricate cases in order to prevent the release from detention of persons who have previously been persecuted.

In the fall of 2019, the occupiers broke into the house of Oleh Prykhodko and searched it, accusing him of allegedly “preparing a terrorist attack” and “manufacturing and storing explosives.” He was accused of planning an explosion in the building of the Russian Consulate General in Lviv, for which he was criminally sentenced to 5 years in a maximum security colony in March 2021.

His unlawful imprisonment is about to expire. However, in January of this year, a Russian court added another month to his sentence for alleged “contempt of court.” And now, according to information from the political prisoner’s daughter, Natalia Prikhodko, they are trying to falsify a new criminal case.

This has happened before with the illegally imprisoned Dmytro Shtyblikov. He was detained by the occupiers on November 9, 2016 in Sevastopol together with Oleksiy Bessarabov and Volodymyr Dudka, who were called “members of the sabotage and terrorist group of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine”. After torture and a lengthy trial, Mr. Shtyblikov was illegally sentenced to 5 years in a high-security penal colony.

However, almost at the end of his sentence, in April 2022, the occupiers insidiously falsified a new criminal case against him for alleged “high treason” and illegally sentenced him to 19 years in a maximum security colony.

Leniya Umerova has been in a similar “carousel” of falsified cases for more than 5 months now – only because she was the only one on the bus at the border with a valid Ukrainian passport, she was first subjected to administrative persecution. Three months in the center for the detention of foreign citizens, and later 4 illegal administrative arrests gave the occupying country time to charge Leniya with alleged “espionage” and imprison her for 2 months. Now the girl is in the Lefortovo detention center.

We call on the international community to respond to the cases of impossibility of releasing from detention persons who were previously illegally convicted in the temporarily occupied Crimea for political reasons.

Indefinite detention in places of detention creates serious threats to the lives and health of our citizens! Only the de-occupation of Crimea will ensure the observance of the rights and freedoms of our citizens.