Director of the National Museum – Prison “Tyurma na Lonskoho” detained by the Security Service
On 8 September in Kyiv the Director of the National Memorial Museum of Victims of the Occupation Regimes “Tyurma na Lonskoho” (Lviv), Ruslan Zabily was detained for 14 and a half hours. According The Press Centre of the Liberation Movement Research Centre reports that the historian was detained for his work with declassified documents.
The Ex-Director of the SBU [Security Service] Central Archive, Volodymyr Vyatrovych calls the detention “total lawlessness” [bespredyel].
“Mr Zabily was detained and his laptop with an external hard disk was removed. The official pretext was that that they supposedly contained documents with the stamp “top secret”. In fact there are only long declassified documents concerning the national liberation movement, documents which I made public on a number of occasions when I headed the SBU Archive”.
“The present regime has set to intimidating historians studying the UPA [Ukrainian Resistance Army] and national liberation movement. This is total lawlessness. There is no guarantee that they won’t soon start going about historians’ flats and removing their personal computers. The SBU is beginning to play at 1937 (the worst year of the Terror – translator].
“We will clearly publish these facts and turn to the world community”, he promised.
Ruslan Zabily and the Ex-Director of the SBU Archive, Volodymyr Vyatrovych have called a press conference for 13.00 on Thursday where they plan to explain who would be threatened by the declassified documents.
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