August 28, 2015

“A court of occupiers”

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In a clearly rigged trial, a Russian court in Rostov-on-Don on August 25 handed down a verdict and a sentence of 20 years’ imprisonment in the case of Oleh Sentsov, 39, the Ukrainian filmmaker who was abducted by Russian security officers in Symferopol, the capital of Crimea, back in May of last year and then miraculously resurfaced in Russian custody in Moscow. He was convicted on trumped-up charges of terrorism in a court proceeding reminiscent of Soviet times, complete with repeated rounds of torture inflicted on the defendant and witnesses forced to give testimony under duress. Tried along with him was Oleksandr Kolchenko, 26, who was sentenced to 10 years. The two men were accused of conspiracy to commit terrorism in Crimea.

Condemnation of the verdict came swiftly from U.S. and European leaders. State Department spokesperson John Kirby told the press: “This is clear miscarriage of justice. Both Ukrainians were taken hostage on Ukrainian territory, transported to and imprisoned in Russia, and had Russian citizenship imposed on them against their wills. …Mr. Sentsov and Mr. Kolchenko were targeted by authorities because of their opposition to Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea.” U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt tweeted that the sentences are “shameful” and strongly condemned what he called a “Russian farce of a ‘legal process.’ ” The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, said, “The EU considers the case to be in breach of international law and elementary standards of justice,” and called on Russian authorities to “immediately release” the two men and guarantee their safe return to Ukraine.

Amnesty International went further, likening the proceedings to the Soviet “trials” of the Stalin-era and calling it “fatally flawed.” Heather McGill, the organization’s Eurasia researcher, stated unequivocally: “The whole trial was designed to send a message. It played into Russia’s propaganda war against Ukraine and was redolent of Stalinist-era show trials of dissidents.” More worrying were the words of Moscow journalist Natalya Kaplan, who is a cousin of Mr. Sentsov. She warned: “I think this trial is the beginning of serious repression in Russia. Current repressions are mild, but if they started talking about such long prison terms in Sentsov’s case, the worst is ahead.”

In fact, the Sentsov case is the second high-profile case in which Soviet-style “justice” and Soviet-era sentences were handed down by a court in Russia. Earlier, on August 19, an officer of Estonia’s Internal Security Service, Eston Kohver, was sentenced by a court in Pskov, Russia, to 15 years of hard labor on charges of espionage. He, too, had been kidnapped by the Russian agents, taken from Estonian territory to Russia, and accused of spying, arms smuggling and violating border regulations. Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said the case “recalled the kind of behavior we noticed on our borders before World War II,” when Soviet troops killed three Latvian border guards before the Soviet Union invaded. As we noted in our post on our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/TheUkrainianWeekly), the results of the Kohver trials did not bode well for other hostages held by Russia.

And then there is Nadiya Savchenko, the courageous pilot-turned-national deputy of Ukraine, about whose case we’ve written in this space before. The most recent development in her case – a Russian court’s rejection of a defense motion to move her trial to Moscow from a small town on the border with Russia – is an indication of her coming conviction, according to her lawyer, Mark Feygin.

Unbowed by his mistreatment at the hands of his Russian captors, Mr. Sentsov delivered a powerful closing statement to the court in which he said Russia is a country “governed by criminals,” that many in Russia “find some sort of rationalization” to not speak out against the regime’s lies, that cowardice is “the greatest sin.” This, too, was reminiscent of Soviet times, but more precisely of the brave Soviet dissidents who stood up to the regime come what may, as Prof. Alexander Motyl pointed out this week on his widely read blog.

“A court of occupiers by definition cannot be just,” Mr. Sentsov asserted in his final statement. That, too was the case during Soviet times. If the cases of these Russian hostages and political prisoners prove nothing else, it is that in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the USSR is back.

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