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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.

Russia imprisons one abducted Crimean Tatar on lawless charges, then comes back for his brothers

19.07.2024   
Halya Coynash
Russia has ramped up insane charges over a civic organization involved in the entirely legal and legitimate Crimean Blockade, in part to justify its abductions and terror in occupied parts of Kherson oblast

Artur Memetshaev Image posted by the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre

Artur Memetshaev Image posted by the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre

Russia’s enforcement bodies are resorting to standard methods of terrorization in occupied Kherson oblast by targeting multiple members of a single family.  Two years after Artur Memetshaev, a Crimean Tatar from Chonhar in Henichesk raion was abducted and later sentenced to six and a half years over alleged involvement in a legal organization on Ukrainian territory, his two brothers, Arsen and Abliamed, have been sentenced on identical charges to five years’ imprisonment.

News of the three searches, three criminal prosecutions and three sentences all in one family has only come now from the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre, although all three brothers are already serving the sentences in various Russian prison colonies.  There have been many occasions since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine where men are reported to have been arrested on charges of involvement in the Noman Çelebicihan Battalion, with ‘trials’ and sentences reported without the abducted person ever being publicly named.  This may be the reason why enough was known about Russia’s abduction, ‘trial’ and 6.5 sentence against Artur Memetshaev for the authoritative Memorial Support for Political Prisoners Project to have declared him a political prisoner, while virtually nothing about Arsen Memetshaev and Abliamed Memetshaev.

Artur Memetshaev, who is married with five children, turned 35 on 8 July 2024 in Russian captivity.  He was abducted by Russians in camouflage gear and armed with machine guns from his home in Chonchar on 11 April 2022.  The men carried out a search, then took Memetshaev away without any explanation. 

These are the tactics that the Russians have applied to all Ukrainian territory that falls under their control.  While some of the thousands of civilians abducted in this way are released in the coming weeks or months, others remain imprisoned, some without any official status at all, with Russia not even admitting to holding them.  

In occupied parts of Kherson oblast, the Russians began targeting Crimean Tatars very early.  There was, for example, a sharp escalation in prosecutions and long prison sentences for supposed involvement in the Noman Çelebicihan Battalion, an unarmed formation which helped monitor the civic blockade of occupied Crimea.  Russia falsely claims that this constitutes ‘participation in the activities of an armed formation, not envisaged by the legislation of that country and acting for purposes which are against the interests of the Russian Federation’ under Article 208 § 2 of Russia’s criminal code. 

In many of the known cases, there has been nothing to suggest that the men thus abducted and then charged with ‘involvement’ were, in fact, ever active in the Battalion.  This is, however, immaterial as there was nothing illegal in such activities in mainland Ukraine, and Russia is in violation of the Geneva Convention for applying its legislation on occupied territory. It is also, surely, flouting fundamental principle of law since it has no right to prosecute Ukrainian citizens for (alleged) legal activities carried out on Ukrainian territory over which Russia was not even claiming, at the time, to have jurisdiction.

The Battalion was founded by Crimean Tatar activist and businessman Lenur Islyamov on 1 January 2016, with the first members people who had taken part in the civic blockade of occupied Crimea.  This blockade was initiated by Crimean Tatar leaders with specifically human rights demands.  It certainly annoyed Moscow, but that does not make the Blockade illegal, unlike Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian Crimea. 

By 1 June 2022, when Russia’s Supreme court labelled the peaceful formation ‘a terrorist organization’, the Battalion had effectively ceased to exist.  The move was almost certainly aimed at providing another weapon of persecution against people abducted from occupied Kherson oblast and has become a conveyor belt of repression with convictions essentially guaranteed. The Supreme court ruling essentially enables the FSB to generate multiple prosecutions without any evidence of an actual crime.  No proof is needed even of genuine involvement in the Battalion as Russia uses anonymous ‘witnesses’ whose identity is concealed and who may never have set eyes on the person charged. 

The FSB claimed that Memetshaev had been a member of the Battalion since 2016, and that, “together with other members, he checked people and cars on bordering territory.”  Even the alleged activities were clearly legal yet, on 17 October 2022, the occupation ‘Kievsky district court’ in Simferopol sentenced Memetshaev to six and a half years’ imprisonment in a harsh-regime prison colony. 

All three brothers are now illegally imprisoned in Russia.  According to the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre, Artur Memetshaev is serving the 6.5-year sentence in a prison colony in Mordovia.  Arsen Memetshaev was sentenced to five years, and is imprisoned in Lipetsk, while Abliamed, who also got five years, is held in Dimitrovgrad.

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