A Russian occupation ‘court’ has upheld the 17-year sentence passed against 43-year-old Yevhen Melnychuk on supposed ‘spying’ charges, laid many months after the Ukrainian activist had been held in Russian captivity and savagely tortured. Russia’s FSB does not appear to have made any effort to render the charges credible with Melnychuk accused of passing Ukraine’s Military Intelligence [HUR] information from street CCTV cameras.
Yevhen Melnychuk (b. 19 May 1982) is originally from Sevastopol and a graduate of the Nakhimov Naval Academy. As his wife, Iryna explained, after heading to Kyiv “for just three days” during the Euromaidan protests, he ended up staying to the end. He was still in Kyiv when iryna phoned and spoke of Russian military vehicles everywhere. Yevhen understood that some kind of military uprising was planned and told his wife to take their then four children) to Kyiv. He, however, headed straight back for Sevastopol, where he helped with provisions and moral support for the Ukrainian military who had been trapped in their quarters by the Russians.
In March 2014, Melnychuk posted a videoed appeal calling on people to fight against Russian occupation. The so-called ‘Crimean self-defence’ paramilitaries reacted by bursting into his apartment, turning it upside down and taking him away, beating him very badly. The family moved to Irpin in Kyiv oblast where Melnychuk was involved in environmental activism and worked as a journalist.
The couple’s sixth child was still a baby when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with residents of Irpin and other cities in Kyiv oblast forced to flee the invading Russian army. Iryna and the children eventually reached Austria, where Iryna says that she hoped her husband would join them. He refused to leave Ukraine. It is not clear when he reached occupied Crimea, but he disappeared from there in October 2022. His parents were able to ascertain that he had been seized by the Russian FSB, but several months passed before they learned that he was in a SIZO [remand prison] in Simferopol and that he was accused of ‘spying’. It was only in the spring of 2024 that they were finally allowed a visit. According to Iryna, he told them that over the 17 months that he had been held prisoner, he had been beaten, tortured, taken out to the forest for mock executions in order to force him to agree to their ‘investigative measures’.
In November 2022, Melnychuk was sentenced by the occupation ‘Crimean high court’ to 17 years in a maximum-security prison colony. It is unclear how many hearings there were, but all such ‘spying trials’ are held behind closed doors, and literally all of them end in guilty verdicts and long sentences. The indictments, as passed on by ‘court’ press services or occupation prosecutor, generally give the impression of being copy-pasted one from another, with no way of verifying any such allegations. This is true here also, with Melnychuk accused of having passed on information about the deployment and movements of Russian military personnel and technology around occupied Crimea. The only different, albeit a curious one, is the claim that he obtained such information from CCTV footage. The charge was of ‘spying’, under Article 276 of Russia’s criminal code, illegally applied by Russia on occupied territory.
Even without evidence of torture, there would be no grounds for calling such a predetermined sentence passed in secrecy a real trial. The same is undoubtedly true of ‘appeal’ hearings, with the supposed panel of ‘judges’ from the occupation ‘Crimean high court’ (or, as suggested by RIA Novosti, by Russia’s supreme court, predictably leaving the sentence unchanged.
