Young Crimean Tatar gets 12-year sentence for non-existent plan to attack Russian puppet ‘minister’

A Russian-controlled ‘court’ in occupied Crimea has sentenced 25-year-old Mamut Belyalov to 12 years’ imprisonment for supposedly plotting an attack on Vadym Volchenko while the latter was the Russian-installed ‘tourism minister’.  This is the latest in a long string of such prosecutions based solely on claims by Russia’s FSB to have ‘thwarted” plans to kill this or that Russian-installed ‘official’.  The only ‘proof’ that there was a plot almost invariably comes from ‘confessions’ obtained through torture while the person was held totally incommunicado. 

We know more than usual about this case because Belyalov was held for some time in the Simferopol SIZO [remand prison] together with Nariman Dzhelyal, world-renowned Crimean Tatar leader, journalist and, until 24 August 2024, Moscow’s most famous Ukrainian political prisoner.  In March 2023, Dzhelyal wrote about Belyalov, describing him as the latest victim of Russian law enforcement bodies’ lawlessness in Crimea.  He explained that the young Crimean Tatar had been seized on 10 September 2022 in occupied Feodosia and accused of an attempt to kill the ‘minister of resorts and tourism’.  He had, Dzhelyal wrote, been subjected to savage torture. 

According to Mamut, he had been in the ninth grade in 2014 when, after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, the new occupation ‘administration’ appeared at school and told the students that they needed to get new, Russian, citizenship.  Mamut refused.  Feeling unable to remain in occupied Crimea, in 2017 he entered Kherson State Agrarian University and, on graduating, found work according to his profession at a Kherson farm.

He returned to Crimea for family reasons in September 2021.  He had planned to leave within a couple of months, however, following the death of his grandfather, he remained at home, finding work on construction sites.

He was detained on 10 September 2022 and charged the following day with attempted murder under several parts of Article 105 § 2 and Article 30 of Russia’s criminal code.  It was claimed that, in the summer of 2022, somebody from Ukraine identified only as ‘Ilya’ had decided to kill the ‘tourism minister’.  He had, purportedly, enlisted Ihor Tyshchenko to directly carry out the killing, and Belyalov to find a weapon and pass “remuneration” to Tyshchenko.  The latter is a standard part of such cases with Russia’s FSB eager, on the one hand, to claim that somebody was “working for Ukraine”, while on the other, present this as having been for mercenary motives, and not, Heaven forbid, on ideological grounds.  Mamut has said that he did indeed receive a call from an acquaintance from Kherson called Ilya, and that the latter had asked him to help find Tyshchenko somewhere to stay in Feodosia.

It is not clear whether Tyshchenko was working for the FSB or had himself been tortured or threatened into setting up Belyalov, but this appears to have been what happened.  Armed enforcement officers burst in on the scene and claimed to have ‘found’ a package containing a pistol and grenade.

Belyalov was subjected to horrific torture, including through electric currents, beatings, and threats of rape which they would video and post on the Internet.

They also tried to get him to provide ‘testimony’ against one or other person whom they would accuse of involvement in Hizb ut-Tahrir or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

He says that he ‘confessed’ because of the torture and also to protect the friend with whom he had arrived that evening in Feodosia and who had also ended up seized by the FSB.  Tyshchenko was not detained, and Dzhelyal wrote at the end of March 2023 that he was probably going to appear as prosecution ‘witness’. 

It is, unfortunately, likely that Belyalov never had an independent lawyer and did not retract his ‘confession’ as obtained through torture in ‘court’  Such retractions are invariably ignored by Russian or Russian-controlled ‘courts’, but are, nonetheless, important records of the methods used. 

We know only that, on 23 September, 2024, before ‘prosecutor’ Oleksandr Dombrovsky, the occupation ‘Kievsky district court’ in Simferopol under ‘judge Mykhailo Bilousov found Belyalov ‘guilty’ of possessing a weapon and of a plan to kill Vadym Volchenko.  With particular cynicism, Volchenko lodged a civil suit demanding one million roubles in ‘moral compensation’.  As well as the 12-year sentence in a maximum-security prison colony, Belyalov was ordered to pay the million roubles, as well as a fine of 350 thousand roubles.  This is likely to mean that his family will not be able to send money for vital food and other items, since any money will immediately be taken for these preposterous penalties.