Crimean Tatar businessman abducted and imprisoned for supporting blockade of Russian-occupied Crimea 9 years ago
A Russian-controlled ‘court’ in occupied Henichesk (Kherson oblast) has sentenced Nariman Abliavov to three and a half years’ imprisonment on legally absurd charges. The Ukrainian citizen was accused of involvement while in mainland Ukraine in an organization which is perfectly legal in Ukraine. Or was legal, since the Noman Çelebicihan Battalion has long ceased to exist, although Russia is using charges of ‘involvement’ in it for conveyor belt prosecutions against people for opposing Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
Nariman Abliazov is a businessman, civic activist and philanthropist, who has actively supported measures aimed at preserving Crimean Tatar identity. All of that would have made him an obvious target for the Russian invaders who seized control of Henichesk at the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In a statement of protest over his abduction in March 2023, the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre reported that the Russians had first come for Nariman’s wife who had been held for some time in the basement of College No. 17, which the invaders immediately began using to imprison and, generally, torture civilian hostages. All of this suggested, they said, that the family were being persecuted for their civic activities. He was detained on 3 September 2023 and has, presumably, been imprisoned since then. He was charged both with ‘involvement’ in the Noman Çelebicihan Battalion and with having assisted Ukraine’s blockade of Crimea.
Although most unlikely that Russia has any real evidence to back the charges, this is entirely immaterial. The aggressor state is brazenly violating international law by applying its legislation on occupied territory and is illegally holding Ukrainian citizens in penal institutions in the Russian Federation. The charges in this case, and with respect to at least two other conveyor-belt series of prosecutions, impugn behaviour that is legal in Ukraine, with huge sentences passed against people who are not even alleged to have committed recognizable crimes.
Russia is claiming that participation in the Noman Çelebicihan Battalion constituted ‘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.
The Noman Çelebicihan Battalion was never an armed formation, but a civic organization which was perfectly legal in Ukraine. In carrying out such prosecutions, Russia is ignoring the fact that the aims of the Battalion, namely the liberation of Russian-occupied Crimea, are those endorsed by the UN and other international bodies, and are in no way illegal. The Battalion was founded by Crimean Tatar activist and businessman Lenur Islyamov on 1 January 2016, with it made up of people who had taken part in the civic blockade of occupied Crimea. This blockade was initiated by Crimean Tatar leaders Mustafa Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov, together with Islyamov, on 20 September 2015, and demanded an end to trade, and supplies of electricity to Crimea while it remained under Russian occupation. Battalion members merely promoted the goods and energy blockade and provided backup for Ukrainian border guards in areas near the administrative border with occupied Crimea. Even were Russia to have proof that a specific person was involved in the certain acts of sabotage to electricity cables, it would still have no jurisdiction, as the acts took place on indisputably Ukrainian territory, under Ukrainian legislation. There are no grounds for Russia’s attempt in these prosecutions to claim that men received training in the use of firearms.
Russia began abducting, torturing and ‘sentencing’ Crimean Tatars to periods of imprisonment up to ten years on the above charges back in 2018. Although the Battalion had already ceased to exist, Russia’s politically subservient supreme court declared the battalion ‘a terrorist organization’ on 1 June 2022. The move was probably intended to ‘justify’ Russia’s abductions of civilians from occupied parts of Kherson oblast.
In this case, the Russian FSB claimed that “in 2015 Abliazov joined the Crimean Tatar Noman Çelebicihan Battalion which was carrying out a food, energy and water blockade of Crimea from the Ukrainian border and was planning to fight, including by armed means, for the return of the peninsula to Ukraine”.
It is disturbing that the report of this ‘sentence’, purportedly passed by an unrecognized occupation ‘Henichesk district court’, stated that it had already come into force. It is unclear whether an appeal had also been ‘heard’, or whether Abliazov had ‘admitted’ to the charges. Such ‘confessions’ are typically obtained through torture, especially if, as is quite possible, Abliazov was prevented from having an independent lawyer. Abliazov had also seen his wife targeted once and could have agreed to admit to the charges if the FSB threatened to come for her again. The 3.5-year sentence is lower than that often passed, but the first year is to be in a prison, the worst of Russia’s penal institutions, with the remainder in a maximum-security prison colony.
Russia has imprisoned over 30 Ukrainian citizens, most of them Crimean Tatars, on these illegal charges, with an ever-mounting number seized in occupied Kherson oblast.
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