First Russia abducts and imprisons young Crimean Tatar, then it sentences his father on equally nonsensical charges
An illegal Russian ‘court’ in occupied Henichesk has sentenced Khalil Kurtamet to eight years’ maximum-security imprisonment two years after his son, Appaz Kurtamet was abducted and later sentenced to seven years. The charges against father were different from those against his son, but both were equally lawless and surreal.
Appaz Kurtamet
Appaz Kurtamet (b. 19.08.2002) was just 19 when, on 23 July 2022, he was abducted by the Russian FSB while trying to get from his home in Novooleksiivka (Kherson oblast) to occupied Crimea to visit relatives. He effectively disappeared for several months, with Russian enforcement bodies denying any knowledge of his whereabouts while holding him incommunicado, without access to an independent lawyer. It was only in October 2022 that Russia admitted to holding him and came up with the absurd charge of having ‘financed an illegal armed formation” under Article 208 § 1 of Russia’s criminal code. It was claimed that he had ‘financed’ the Crimea volunteer battalion by sending 500 UAH, or around 12-13 euros, to a friend who, it later transpired, was defending Ukraine as part of this battalion.
Appaz had sent the money in mainland Ukraine, where he was living, and, even had the money been knowingly intended for the Crimea Battalion, there was nothing illegal about the battalion under Ukrainian law. Nor was there any proof that this very small amount of money had been sent to ‘finance’ the battalion, and not as a loan to a friend which was repaid. In declaring Appaz Kurtamet a political prisoner, the Memorial Support for Political Prisoners Project points out that there is evidence in the form of correspondence and bank statements confirming that this was a personal loan. Since Appaz was effectively abducted at the checkpoint into occupied Crimea, it is worth noting that there is nothing to suggest that any criminal charges had been laid against the young Crimean Tatar before he arrived at the checkpoint and was abducted by the Russian FSB.
He had also been illegally imprisoned for several months when finally allowed to contact his family on 5 October 2022 and then, on 10 October, remanded in custody by ‘judge’ Viktor Viktorovych Krapko. The FSB typically holds people incommunicado in order to torture or otherwise pressure them into signing ‘confessions’. It is probably significant, in this respect, that Appaz signed such a ‘confession’ in October 2022, but later retracted this.
On 20 April 2023, ‘judge’ Oksand Viktorovna Karchevskaya from the occupied Kievsky district found Appaz Kurtamet ‘guilty’ and sentenced him to seven years’ maximum-security imprisonment, with the first year in a prison, the harshest of Russian penal institutions.
That sentence was upheld at appeal level on 29 August 2023 by the occupation ‘Crimean high court’ under presiding ‘judge’ Dmitry Olegovich Mykhailov.
Khalil Kurtamet
Russia’s FSB came for Appaz’s father on (or just before) 8 November 2023. Novooleksiivka is in Henichesk raion and has been occupied since shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with Russia claiming it to have ‘joined’ the Russian Federation in September 2022. Since then, Russia’s FSB has turned an absurd charge first applied in occupied Crimea in 2018 into one of its conveyor-belt prosecutions, mainly targeting Crimean Tatars.
Khalil Kurtamet, who is now 58, was accused of having taken “an active part in the Crimean Tatar Noman Çelebicihan Battalion” and having given money to equip the Battalion’s base in Chonkhar. This was claimed to constitute “participation in the activities of an unlawful armed formation acting on the territory of a foreign country 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 neither an armed, nor an unlawful, formation. It was founded at the beginning of January 2016 by Crimean Tatar activist and businessman Lenur Islyamov, with the first members people who had taken part in the civic blockade of occupied Crimea. This was initiated in September 2015 by Crimean Tatar leaders with specifically human rights demands, including release of the ever-mounting number of political prisoners and freedom of speech. Neither support for a fully legitimate blockade of Russian-occupied Crimea, nor the Battalion’s ultimate objective, namely the end to Russian occupation, made its activities illegal. This is in contrast to Russia’s use of its legislation on occupied territory in flagrant violation of international law.
The huge increase in such prosecutions is particularly telling since the Battalion has not existed for some time. It was not functioning even on 1 June 2022 when Russia’s increasingly politicized supreme court labelled the peaceful formation ‘a terrorist organization’. That ruling was almost certainly aimed at providing another weapon of persecution against civilians abducted from occupied Kherson oblast.
Convictions in these politically motivated ‘trials’ are essentially guaranteed, with the only variable being the size of the sentence. That against Khalil Kurtamet, coming so soon after the sentence against his political prisoner son seems very brutal. The 58-year-old Crimean Tatar was sentenced on 17 October to eight years in a maximum-security prison colony by the occupation ‘Henichesk district court’.
On 27 September 2024, that same occupation ‘court’ sentenced Husein Huseinov to 3.5 years’ maximum-security imprisonment on the same charge.
See also:
Akim Gafarov
Journalist Hennadiy Osmak
Nariman Abliazov