More than a decade after Russia's illegal annexation of Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, many court hearings take place without the public, media or independent lawyers present. Among those convicted for their opposition to the Russian state in Crimea last year were Ukrainians captured in other Russian-occupied regions of the country.
After a decade under Russian occupation, Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula is a less free place, especially for those who dared to defy the Kremlin.
But it's not just the cases of Crimean locals that Moscow-controlled judges are interrogating these days.
Since Russia launched its unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Crimean penal facilities have become home to many politically active Ukrainians abducted from other parts of the country that fell under Russian occupation.
Radio Free Europe observed some of the most important trials that took place on the Black Sea peninsula in 2024.
Crimean resident sentenced for objecting to "Z" symbol
In August 2023, Crimean resident Dilaver Salimov expressed his anger when he saw an attendant wearing a baseball cap with the symbol "Z" promoting and justifying Russian military aggression at a gas station in the small town of Stariji. Crime.
Salimov demanded that the attendant remove his hat and allegedly threatened to "pay someone to set the attendant on fire."
Footage of the incident was posted on a Telegram channel allegedly linked to Russia's Federal Security Service, and reports of Salimov's detention quickly followed.
Initially, Salimov was fined for "discrediting the Russian army".
The death threat charges against Salimov were only brought after he refused to apologize via video while in custody, according to the Crimean Human Rights Group.
The trial against him began in February this year and was closed to the press.
Salimov's lawyers criticized a linguistic analysis, which they said contained several errors in spelling, punctuation and basic logic.
Judge Georgy Tsertsvadze ignored these appeals, sentencing the accused to a year in a penal colony (a form of punishing accused by staying away from the rest of the population for a time).
Salimov is a Crimean Tatar, part of a Turkic-speaking, mainly Muslim group native to Crimea.
In a report to mark the 10th anniversary of Russia's occupation of the peninsula last year, rights watchdog Amnesty International accused Russia of "attempting to change the ethnic makeup of Crimea by suppressing non-Russian identities on the peninsula".
Moscow has done so by "restricting education in the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages while targeting religious minorities, stifling media and culture, as well as undermining institutional representation and abusing the criminal justice system," the organization said, citing data that "Russia has transferred its population inside Crimea in violation of international law".
Peninsula for prisoners
According to the Crimea-focused civic group Irade, threats of violence against Crimeans known to support Ukraine have been common throughout the occupation.
Formal prosecution, as in Salimov's case, is rare.
But since Russia's full-scale unprovoked invasion began in 2022 there have been several high-profile cases of residents of other occupied regions of Ukraine being forcibly relocated to the peninsula to face arbitrary justice. .
Ukrainian activist and writer Serhiy Tsihypa was abducted by Russian forces from his hometown of Nova Kakhovka in Ukraine's Kherson region in March 2022 after the town fell under Russian control.
He was a volunteer and sent food and medicine to the elderly in the then occupied territories.
Tsihypa was held for nine months without charge, without legal advice and without contact with his family, before being forced to confess and charged with espionage.
In October 2023, the Russian-appointed Supreme Court of the Republic of Crimea sentenced Tsihypa to 13 years in prison for the charges against him.
In February 2024, this decision was enforced.
Tsihypa is now serving his sentence away from Nova Kakhova and Crimea, in a maximum-security penal colony in Russia's Ryazan region.
Oleksandr Tarasov, another Ukrainian activist was in custody with Tsihypan in Simferopol, Crimea.
Tarasov, who was released in 2023 and allowed to join his family in Germany, said Tsihypa suffered torture and brutal ill-treatment because of his past service in Ukraine's military and secret service.
Fewer details are known about the trial of Iryna Horobtsova, an IT specialist and human rights defender who publicly opposed the Russian occupation of the city of Kherson and disappeared in May 2022.
After initially denying any involvement in her disappearance, Russian authorities confirmed in August 2024 that Horobtsova had been sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison for espionage.
Prosecutors said Horobtsova "gathered and passed information (to Ukrainian intelligence) about the locations, times, routes and movements" of Russian military units in her home region. They claimed this happened "from February 2022 to March 2023", but Ukrainian and international rights groups raised concerns about Horobtsova's abduction and transfer to Crimea during this period.
Dmytro Shaynoga, a resident of the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, which was partially occupied by Russian forces, disappeared in October 2022 and was later found in a Crimean detention center by the secretive human rights group The Tribunal. Crimea.
In October 2024, Russia's Prosecutor General's Office announced that he had been sentenced to 12 years in prison after being accused of providing sites for operations used by Ukrainian intelligence. It is unclear how he pleaded guilty and whether or not he had access to a lawyer. The decision was attributed to a court in Zaporizhia.
Revenge for the Nord incident
The incident attracted a lot of attention in Russian propaganda.
In May 2022, two Ukrainian border guards involved in that operation, Ivan Tereshchenko and Vasyl Dmytriuk, were captured by Russian forces along the Azovstal encirclement from Moscow to Mariupol.
Accused of robbing the ship and kidnapping its crew, the two men pleaded not guilty during their trial in Simferopol, arguing that they had acted under official orders to protect Ukraine's borders.
Despite the inconsistencies in the Prosecution's case and the judge's refusal to accept the evidence offered by the defense, both were sentenced to 17 years in prison. Russian media reported in June 2024 that the sentences remained in effect after the case was appealed in November.
In March 2018, Ukrainian authorities detained a fishing vessel named Nord in the Sea of Azov for violating Ukrainian law by illegally departing from the occupied Crimean port of Kerchit./ REL (A2 Televizion)
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