It is almost three months since doctors confirmed that Tofik Abdulgaziev’s brain tumour is malignant. Instead of organizing an urgently needed operation and / or freeing the Crimean Tatar political prisoner, as required by Russia’s own legislation, doctors have collaborated with the FSB and prison authorities in a cynical ruse to block his release.
Even Russia has a List of illnesses precluding imprisonment, with Tofik Abdulgaziev’s grave condition clearly on it. Yet Aliye Kurtametova reported on 5 March that a hearing into the defence’s application for her husband’s release on health grounds, scheduled at a district court in Chelyabinsk in late January 2026 was postponed for a month. This was claimed to be “for technical reasons”, although subsequent developments make it clear that the reason lay elsewhere.
The hearing was rescheduled for 27 February, and since there had been worrying silence from Tofik, Aliye managed to contact the lawyer representing her husband. It transpired that Tofik had been removed from the courtroom at the beginning of the hearing with this claimed to be because of his inappropriate behaviour. Given her husband’s nature, Aliye said that this was totally implausible.
Tofik was, fortunately, able to ring that evening and explained what had happened. The day before the hearing, he was taken to a gathering of prison doctors, at which representatives of Russia’s FSB [security service] were also present. The court had asked the prison hospital to provide an assessment of Tofik Abdulgaziev’s state of health. Before even pretending to carry out an examination, Olga Anvarovna Angold, chief medical officer of Prison tuberculosis hospital No, 3 in Chelyabinsk, thrust a document in front of the political prisoner and told him where to sign. It was the dramatic deterioration in Tofik’s eyesight in October 2025 that first raised fears of a brain tumour, and, since he was unable to read the document himself, he asked that it be read out to him. Angold refused to allow this, saying “sign them, then you’ll find out.” Tofik, quite correctly, refused categorically to sign anything without knowing what it said.
The prison staff then began putting huge pressure on him, and Angold’s behaviour was also far ruder and more aggressive than when he had seen her earlier. Tofik is in a very weak state, is suffering from appalling headaches, and, after holding out for some time, finally signed the document “to end this circus”.
It was only in the courtroom that he learned that the document claimed that the prison hospital ‘doctors’ had concluded that Tofik Abdulgaziev is entirely healthy and that he has no objection or complaints if he is moved back from the hospital to the prison colony.
The same ‘doctors’ who, in December 2025, took a CT scan and tests, and found that Tofik Abdulgaziev was suffering from a malignant brain tumour and needed an operation to remove at least part of this tumour, were willing in February, presumably under pressure from the FSB, to sign a ‘clean bill of health’. In so doing, they disregarded all medical training and flagrantly flouted their oath. They chose ‘not to notice’ the fact that even at the time of this so-called ‘Consilium of doctors’ Tofik was running a fever, with a temperature of over 39°C and is clearly in a dangerously weak state. He is now likely to be moved back to the prison colony, where the conditions are even more shocking than in the prison hospital.
Tofik Abdulgaziev (b. 19 June 1982) was in good health until 27 March 2019 when he was targeted in Russia’s worst attack to date on the Crimean Solidarity human rights movement. He has been imprisoned ever since, first in occupied Crimea, then in Russia.
While unclear what causes a brain tumour, Abdulgaziev’s state of health was already gravely compromised because of medical conditions directly linked with his imprisonment in the appalling conditions of Russian penal institutions. He was moved, in July 2023, to the Verkhneuralsk Prison in Chelyabinsk oblast, 2,700 kilometres from his home and family in Crimea. It was after the gruelling journey that he began losing weight and complaining of acute joint pain. By February 2024, his lawyer Emil Kurbedinov reported that he was unable to move about and that he had difficulty even holding a spoon.
He has been in prison tuberculosis hospital No, 3 in Chelyabinsk since March 2024, and was, on 22 March 2024, placed in a critical care ward in a grave state. By the time his family were allowed to see him, he had lost around 40 kilograms and was gaunt and frail. In late April 2024, he was diagnosed with what was then identified simply as tuberculosis, but was clearly a very form, namely disseminated tuberculosis of the lungs, with this having spread to the chest lymph nodes. The doctors also found a number of other serious, some life-threatening conditions - double pneumonia; fluid in the lungs; medium severity anaemia; connective tissue dysplasia with damage to the mitral valve (valvular heart disease); chronic heart failure; chronic gastritis and kidney stones.
It was entirely clear over a year ago that Abdulgaziev should be released on health grounds, but the same, even then, was true of a number of other political prisoners who had died in captivity, including Dzhemil Gafarov, whose detention even Russian regulations prohibit, and Kostiantyn Shyrinh.
Although especially shameful now, this was not the first fake document used in Tofik Abdulgaziev’s case. In the middle of 2024, the prosecution organized its own supposed expert assessment which claimed that Abdulgaziev did not have illnesses that could prevent him from remaining in prison, with this used to justify a formal refusal to comply with Russia’s own legislation and free him.
“What has to be done for us to be heard. Who are the laws written in black and white that say that his diagnosis is including in the list for release?”, Aliye asks, and adds “How deafening the silence is”.
Tofik Abdulgaziev and Aliye have three children – Amar (b. 2005); Medina (b. 2010) and Yarmina (2015) and were also bringing up Aliye’s daughter, Sayire from her first marriage. Although it was clear by 2019 that all human rights activists were in danger, Tofik Abdulgaziev refused to look the other way, as repressed mounted. He played an active role both in Crimean Solidarity, and in the linked Crimean Childhood organization, which particularly provides support to the children of political prisoners. Abdulgaziev actively visited political trials, organized parcels for political prisoners, was sound operator for recordings, and organized activities for children traumatized by the armed raids and arrests of their fathers.
He and his family were subjected to a first armed search on 4 May 2017, with such methods used by the FSB as a ‘first warning’. It was one that Abdulgaziev could not heed, and the FSB came back for him on 27 March 2019.
The arrests that day so blatantly targeted men involved in highlighting repression and helping the victims of persecution that international condemnation was finally vocal. Human Rights Watch called the arrests “an unprecedented move to intensify pressure on a group largely critical of Russia’s occupation of the Crimean Peninsula” and stated unequivocally that attempts “to portray politically active Crimean Tatars as terrorists” is aimed at silencing them. There was similar criticism from the US State Department ; the EU ; Freedom House and Civil Rights Defenders, and the Memorial Human Rights Centre was swift to declare all the men political prisoners and denounce the attempt “to crush the Crimean Tatar human rights movement”.
All of the men were charged only with ‘involvement’ in the Hizb ut-Tahrir movement, a peaceful transnational Muslim organization which is legal in Ukraine and not known to have carried out acts of terrorism anywhere in the world. Russia has never provided any grounds for its highly secretive 2003 Supreme Court ruling that declared Hizb ut-Tahrir ‘terrorist’, yet this inexplicable ruling is now being used as justification for huge sentences on supposed ‘terrorism charges’. Five of the men faced the more serious charge of ‘organizing’ a Hizb ut-Tahrir group (Article 205.5 § 1 of Russia’s criminal code), while the others, including Abdulgaziev were accused of ‘taking part’ in such an unproven group. The aggressor state, which invaded and annexed Crimea also charged the 25 Ukrainian citizens with “planning a violent seizure of power and change in Russia’s constitutional order” (Article 278).
The prosecution claimed that the ‘proof’ to back these charges came from innocuous discussions about religion, politics, courage which were illicitly taped back in early 2016. Three years elapsed before the FSB carried out the arrests, making the ‘terrorism’ charges seem especially preposterous. Faulty transcripts of these conversations were sent to FSB-loyal ‘experts’ who are chosen for their willingness to ‘find’ whatever the FSB demands of them. The defence obtained independent expert assessments by people actually qualified in their field. Their analysis of the supposed expert assessments was damning, but ignored by the court.
As in all of these ‘trials’, the judges collaborated with prosecutor Yury Konstantinovich Nesterov in allowing anonymous or secret witnesses despite the lack of any evidence that these ‘witnesses’ would be in danger if they testified openly. There is considerable evidence that ‘anonymous witnesses’ are often people who have themselves been tortured and / or threatened with imprisonment if they do not collaborate with the FSB. It is invariably these alleged witnesses who claim to have heard the defendants admit to being members of Hizb ut-Tahrir , or similar. They almost always claim to remember particular ‘incriminating conversations’ while demonstrating total ‘amnesia’ about everything else. In the last report on occupied Crimea from UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres , there was particular criticism of Russian convictions based almost exclusively on anonymous testimony, and of the role played by Russian judges in upholding such practice and preventing the defence from exposing the flaws in this alleged ‘testimony’.
Russia split the 25 political prisoners into five groups, staging the same cloned ‘trial’ with each. Tofik Abdulgaziev was found ‘guilty’ on 12 May 2022, together with four other civic activists: Bilyal Adilov (b. 1970); Vladlen Abdulkadyrov (b. 1979): Izet Abdullayev (b. 1986),; and Medzhit Abdurakhmanov (b. 1975). Presiding judge Rizvan Zubairov, together with Maxim Nikitin and Roman Saprunov from the Southern District Military Court sentenced Adilov to 14 years; Abdulgaziev and the other men to 12 years. In all cases the first five years were to be in a prison, the worst of all Russia’s penal institutions. These shocking sentences against evidently innocent men were upheld on 17 May 2023 by ‘judge’ Anatoly Solin and two colleagues from the Military court of appeal in Vlasikha (Moscow region).
Please help, if you can, to ensure publicity for Tofik Abdulgaziev’s situation! Ask your political representatives, human rights groups, or even medical contacts to intercede on his behalf.
