Mykhailo Karimov was just 19 when, in March 2024, he was taken prisoner by Russia’s FSB in occupied Mariupol after being denounced for an argument with an acquaintance fighting for Russia. On 9 December, the young man, now 20, was sentenced by Russia’s fake ‘Donetsk people’s republic high court’ to eleven years in a maximum-security prison colony on supposed ‘spying’ charges. While Russia’s illegal occupation of Mariupol and crushing of any independent media make it impossible to independently verify the information, the copy-paste nature of the indictment alone suggests that Mykhailo is the latest of an ever-mounting number of victims of the terrorization and repression that Russia’s invasion has brought to Mariupol.
Petro Andriushchenko, Adviser to the Mayor of Mariupol, reported on 14 March that “We warned that we can expect a tsunami of staged or simply selective arrests of Mariupol residents. Simply for [the Russian FSB’s] reporting. For example, a 19-year-old orphan was arrested in the last few days, just like that, following a denunciation”. In reporting a sharp increase by the Russian occupiers of Ukrainian civilians during the first half of March 2024 and citing Andriushchenko, the Centre for Journalist Investigations [CJI] mentioned the ‘arrest’ of 19-year-old Mykhailo Karimov as an example of the Russian FSB’s fabrication of cases. It pointed out also that, just as in Soviet times, a lot of people had ended up in Russian captivity after being denounced by collaborators.
Mykhailo Karimov had, it was believed, become the a victim of just such a slanderous denunciation after ignoring basic rules of safety under Russian occupation. He had, while tipsy, got into a row with a person he knew who had chosen to fight for the invaders, and had posted a video of the row on social media. He had, as a result, ended up charged with ‘spying’, CJI wrote, with this carrying a sentence of up to 20 years. They noted too that of the 25 civilians reported to have been ‘detained’ by the invaders from 1 – 14 March, they had only been able to establish the names of the ten Crimean Tatars seized and Mykhailo Karimov.
On 19 November, it was reported that the so-called ‘case’ against Karimov had been passed to an occupation ‘court’ in Russia’s so-called ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ [‘DPR’], with the charge of ‘spying’. The ‘prosecution’ was claiming that Karimov had, from December 2022 (aged 18) through to June 2023, gathered information about the places of deployment and operative movement of military equipment and subdivisions of the Russian army. The standard phrase was added that this information could have been used to fire at the places where Russian military were deployed. It was also claimed that he had purchased ammunition which he had kept at his home.
Then on 10 December, the Russian occupation ‘DPR prosecutor’ reported that Karimov had been sentenced to eleven years’ maximum-security imprisonment on ‘spying’ charges under Article 276 of Russia’s criminal code and of ‘unlawfully obtaining, possessing, etc. ammunition). The sentence had been passed by the illegal ‘DPR high court’, with it further specified that the information he was alleged to have gathered was supposedly passed to Ukraine’s Military Intelligence [HUR]. He was claimed to have obtained the ammunition between March 2022 and October 2023. The young man was also fined 20 thousand roubles.
Russia has no right under international law to impose its legislation on occupied territory, so any such ‘trial’ is, by definition. Illegal. There is every reason to doubt the charges that the Russian FSB essentially copy-paste from ‘trial’ to ‘trial’, often after it first abducted Ukrainian civilians from their homes, savagely tortured them and held them incommunicado for two years and more.
These are also ‘trials’ in the Russian narrative alone. In all these cases, we learn of such an alleged ‘trial’ only after sentence has been passed by unrecognized, occupation ‘courts’, with no information even as to the number of hearings. If, as is likely in such ‘trials’ behind closed doors, there was only one hearing because Karimov had agreed to plead ‘guilty’, it is of critical importance, but unlikely that he had an independent lawyer. Nor are the names of the so-called ‘judges’ and ‘prosecutor’ known. Under such circumstances, it seems clear that Karimov could not possibly have had a fair trial, even without raising the question of torture, which international monitors have concluded is widespread and systematic practice.
