16-year ‘sentence’ in occupied Luhansk oblast for opposing Russian invasion of Ukraine

A Russian occupation ‘court’ in the so-called ‘Luhansk people’s republic’ [‘LPR’] has ‘sentenced’ two Ukrainians from Luhansk oblast, Oleksandr Sokolov and Viktor Soldatko, to 16 and 13 years, respectively.  Both Ukrainians living in Ukraine were illegally charged under Article 276 (‘spying’) of the aggressor state’s criminal code, while Sokolov was additionally charged with making ‘public calls to extremism’, under Article 280 § 2.  There is every reason to assume that the men’s alleged ‘confessions’ were extracted through torture, and nothing to suggest that either of the men had an independent lawyer. 

Oleksandr Sokolov

Essentially all that is known about Sokolov is that he is 51 and from occupied Luhansk, however the sentence does give a hint to the kind of activities that prompted his seizure.  As well as sentencing him to 16 years in a maximum-security prison colony, the so-called ‘LPR high court’ banned him for two years from administering websites or creating social media pages.

It was claimed that, from October 2022 to February 2023, Sokolov gathered information about the movement and places of deployment of Russian forces.  This was allegedly passed to the Ukrainian Security Service [SBU] via Messenger.

It was, seemingly, an Internet post in March 2023, call for ‘punishment’ of those individuals who chose to collaborate with the occupation ‘enforcement bodies’ and ‘courts’ that was claimed to be “public calls to extremism”. 

The ‘case’ was passed to the ‘LPR high court’ on 17 June, with both the ‘sentence’ and the video of Sokolov’s seizure and supposed ‘confession’ posted on 23 September.  It is entirely unclear how many hearings there were, and we know only that the ‘prosecutor’ was Gleb Mykhailov. 

As mentioned, Russian propaganda media posted a video in which Sokolov supposedly ‘confessed’ to having gathered and passed information to Ukrainian Telegram channels about Russian military movements and also said that he opposed the so-called ‘special military operation’. Russia’s euphemism for its war of aggression against Ukraine.  FSB ‘videoed confessions’ have formed the main ‘evidence’ of politically motivated ‘trials’ of Ukrainians since 2014, and we know from every case where a person has since been released, or at least allowed an independent lawyer, that they were extracted by electric shocks, mock executions, savage beatings and other forms of torture.

While next to certain that the ‘confession’ here was part of Russia’s specific FSB genre, it is also worth noting that the actions he ‘confessed’ to can hardly be called a crime under any circumstances, let alone with respect to a Ukrainian whose country is facing a full-scale invasion

Viktor Soldatko is just 28 and was sentenced by the same ‘LPR high court’ to 13 years in a maximum security prison colony for supposed ‘spying’.  He too was claimed to have passed on information about the movement of Russian forces, with this allegedly to the SBU via Telegram channels.  This had, supposed, been aimed at ‘harming the security of the Russian Federation’.  Most ominously, Soldatko, who is also not known to have received independent legal assistance, is alleged to have ‘fully admitted guilt and confessed’.