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The Tribunal for Putin (T4P) global initiative was set up in response to the all-out war launched by Russia against Ukraine in February 2022.

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Russia seeks secret trial of tortured Ukrainian accused of Crimea ‘sabotage plot’

17.04.2018   
Halya Coynash
‘Secret documents’ have been cited in Russian-occupied Crimea to justify holding the trial of Yevhen Panov behind closed doors. Since no secret material was ever mentioned to either Panov, or his lawyer, this may well simply be the latest attempt to conceal the lack of any substance to the charges against the Ukrainian

‘Secret documents’ have been cited in Russian-occupied Crimea to justify holding the trial of Yevhen Panov behind closed doors.   Since no secret material was ever mentioned to either Panov, or his lawyer, this may well simply be the latest attempt to conceal the lack of any substance to the charges against the Ukrainian.

It will not be the first time.  Panov was held for two months without access to a lawyer after being seized and tortured in August 2016, and has been under massive pressure ever since to plead ‘guilty’ to concocted charges.

Speaking after the hearing, Panov’s lawyer Dmitry Dinze explained that they had been suddenly told that the material includes a ‘secret volume’.  If there really are such ‘state secrets’, then the investigator has committed a crime by not telling either Dinze or his client, and Panov could certainly have passed such information on to his family. 

Dinze was also asked to sign a non-disclosure undertaking, but refused on the grounds that there are no state secrets involved. He later told Hromadske Radio that the ‘secret volume’ is supposedly about the sites where the alleged ‘acts of sabotage’ were supposedly planned. 

Panov is charged with planning acts of sabotage in Crimea as part of a group of saboteurs,  as well as with “smuggling ammunition across the customs border of the Customs Union”, with four articles of the Russian criminal code listed (Article 281 § 2a for the planning acts of sabotage; Article 226.1 § 3 and 222 § 3 over the alleged movement and storage of ammunition, as well 30 § 1, and 3 – committing or attempting a crime). 

He is now accused of having planned acts of sabotage on civilian and military sites in Crimea, with these supposedly including a water reservoir; a Russian military unit; a ferry crossing; a chemical factory and plans to blow up Pantsir C1 self-propelled anti-aircraft military weapon systems..

The then 39-year-old from Zaporizhya worked as a  driver for the Zaporizhya Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar, but had also responded to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and military aggression in Donbas by active work as a volunteer, both in civil defence for his city and in helping the Ukrainian army.

On August 6, 2016, Panov responded to a phone call, seemingly from a fellow volunteer, asking him to help evacuate a family from Russian-occupied Crimea who were in danger. This, however, his family only discovered much later, after he disappeared.

The first they learned of his whereabouts was on August 10 when Russia’s FSB [security service] claimed that it had foiled terrorist acts planned by the Ukrainian Defence Ministry’s military intelligence and targeting critically important parts of Crimea’s infrastructure.  This was aimed, the FSB asserted, at destabilizing the situation in the run-up to Russia’s elections which were illegally taking place in occupied Crimea.

The FSB asserted that there had been major incidents, with shelling from mainland Ukraine, during the nights from 6-7 and 7-8 August, with 2 Russians – an FSB officer and a soldier – killed.  Although two Russians did die, there are independent reports suggesting that at least one of the men was killed in a drunken brawl.  There was nothing to back the claims about the second night and supposed shelling from Ukraine.  Scepticism was only exacerbated by the fact that the occupation regime had blocked various independent Internet sites prior to the alleged events.   

The claims were trumpeted by Russia’s leaders and state-controlled media, but based solely on videoed ‘confessions’ from four men: Panov; Andriy ZakhteiRedvan Suleymanov; and Volodymyr Prysich

The video with Panov’s ‘confession’ and, supposedly, his and Zakhtei’s stockpile of weapons was very sloppily done.  One scene for example showed a full moon which meant it must have been shot at least three weeks earlier.  An independent forensic analysis found no traces to suggest that Panov and Zakhtei had ever touched the alleged stockpile. 

A video produced by the FSB was shown widely on state-controlled Russian media.  On it, Panov is seen ‘confessing’ to working for Ukrainian military intelligence and saying that he was invited to Kyiv and told that a group was being formed for acts of sabotage in Crimea. He reels off several names, none of them the people he was allegedly caught with, and says that they had come to Crimea together to decide on targets for the acts of sabotage and had chosen the ferry crossing, an oil handling terminal, a helicopter regiment and chemical factory. 

On the video, Panov looked as though he had been beaten and also as though he was saying what he had been instructed to say.

It was therefore of immense concern that the FSB prevented the lawyer Panov’s family employed from seeing his client.  At one stage they produced a scrap of paper, with a typed statement, allegedly from Panov, rejecting the lawyer’s services.  The paper was unsigned, and his family, by now seriously worried, were helped by a human rights group to apply to the European Court of Human Rights.  The latter demanded information from Russia regarding the origin of Panov’s bruises, etc. and confirmation that he had been allowed to see the lawyer his family had chosen.

Following this communication from ECHR, and after two full months of total isolation, Panov was able to briefly meet with the lawyer.  He immediately retracted all testimony, confirming that it had been obtained under torture.  He has since described the torture methods, which form part of his application to ECHR, with these including severe beating; being suspended in handcuffs; mock executions; electric shocks and clamps applied to his genitals.

Both Panov and Zakhtei were moved to Moscow shortly after that brief meeting and placed under heavy pressure to give up their independent lawyers.  They refused and were soon moved back to Crimea, and the Simferopol SIZO [remand unit] where the conditions are in themselves a form of torture.

The mounting pressure and threats of a much worse sentence if he didn’t comply finally prompted Zakhtei to agree to cooperate.  He pleaded ‘guilty’ and gave up his lawyer, yet a Russian-controlled court in Crimea still sentenced him on 16 February 2018 to 6.5 years imprisonment. 

It is likely that Zakhtei’s ‘confession’ will be used to claim that the charges against him and Panov have been ‘proven’. 

In fact, nothing is proven, and a telling detail is that of the four men accused of involvement in a supposed plot which they were shown on Russian TV ‘confessing’ to, one - Redvan Suleymanov – ended up accused of something only slightly linked to the original ‘confession’, while Volodymyr Prysich was sentenced on May 18, 2017 to 3 years’ imprisonment on the totally different charge of possession of a narcotic substance. 

While Suleymanov remained silent about the treatment he had received, his lawyer Emil Kurbedinov clearly assumed that he had been tortured.  The three other men have all spoken of the torture, including electric shocks to their genitals,  used to extract confessions to non-existent ‘sabotage’ plots.

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