New charges, this time of ‘treason’, have been brought against 27-year-old Mamut Belyalov. It is, unfortunately, near certain that only the article of Russia’s criminal code has changed, with the savage methods of torture used to extract ‘confessions’ the same as those first used against Mamut back in 2022 when the young man was abducted from his home in occupied Crimea.
It was feared that the FSB were fabricating new charges back in October 2025 when the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre [CTRC] reported that Belyalov had been brought back to Simferopol and, without a lawyer present, had been subjected to supposed ‘interrogation’, but in fact beating.
CTRC has now learned that over the 8 months since Belyalov was brought back to Simferopol from a prison colony in Volgograd, he had only once been allowed to phone his father. Any other communication had to be through letters which will certainly be read by the SIZO [prison] staff.
The ‘treason’ charge, under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code, seems to have only now been formally initiated, with the so-called ‘investigators’ clearly expanding their methods to include psychological pressure and threats against Belyalov’s family. Mamut is constantly brought in for so-called ‘interrogation’, with these nothing of the kind, as his family are also ‘invited’ in at the same time for supposed visits, with these videoed and recorded, with FSB and convoy staff always hovering.
The ‘investigator’ first summons Belyalov for interrogation, and then members of his family, with all of this again taking place without a lawyer present. The questions asked are those that, under the current Russian / Russian occupation regime, are likely to get a person arrested, namely about the political situation, about their attitude to Ukraine and to the so-called ‘special military operation’, as Russia calls its war of aggression against Ukraine. There would be no reason for any of these lawless methods of terrorizing Belyalov and his entire family if the investigators genuinely had grounds for new charges against the young Crimean Tatar.
Mamut Belyalov was first seized on 10 September 2022, when he was just 24. The FSB accused him of planning to kill Vadym Volchenko, the Russian-installed ‘tourism minister’ in occupied Crimea. The FSB has been claiming to have ‘thwarted’ alleged attacks, etc. since soon after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea. All such claims, and the resulting ‘trials’ and long sentences, are based solely, or almost entirely, on ‘confessions’ extracted through various forms of torture and threats. On many occasions, the victims have recounted being forced to take a grenade or gun in their hands, as well as to provide DNA without a lawyer present, in order to fabricate ‘material evidence’.
It is likely that Belyalov’s family only learned what had happened to the young man thanks to information from Nariman Dzhelyal, Crimean Tatar Mejlis leader, journalist and, until 24 August 2024, Moscow’s most famous Ukrainian political prisoner. In March 2023, Dzhelyal wrote about Belyalov, describing him as the latest victim of Russian enforcement agents’ lawlessness in Crimea. Belyalov had been seized on 10 September 2022, he wrote, and had been tortured to get him to ‘confess’ to the supposed attempt on the life of Volchenko.
The young man had told him that he had been in the ninth grade in 2014. After Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea, the new occupation ‘administration’ appeared at school and told the students that they needed to get new, Russian, citizenship. Mamut refused. Feeling unable to remain in occupied Crimea, in 2017 he entered Kherson State Agrarian University and, on graduating, found work according to his profession at a Kherson farm. He returned to Crimea for family reasons in September 2021. He had planned to leave within a couple of months, however, following the death of his grandfather, he remained at home, finding work on construction sites.
Belyalov was accused of attempted murder under several parts of Article 105 § 2 and Article 30 of Russia’s criminal code. It was claimed that, in the summer of 2022, somebody from Ukraine identified only as ‘Ilya’ had decided to kill the ‘tourism minister’. He had, purportedly, enlisted Ihor Tyshchenko to directly carry out the killing, and Belyalov to find a weapon and pass “remuneration” to Tyshchenko. The latter is a standard part of such cases with Russia’s FSB eager, on the one hand, to claim that somebody was “working for Ukraine”, while on the other, present this as having been for mercenary motives, not out of patriotism.
Belyalov was subjected to electric current and other forms of torture, as well as beatings and threats of rape which his captors said they would video and post on the Internet. They also tried to get him to provide ‘testimony’ against one or other person whom they would accuse of involvement in Hizb ut-Tahrir or the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
On 23 September, 2024, before ‘prosecutor’ Oleksandr Dombrovsky, the occupation ‘Kievsky district court’ in Simferopol under ‘judge Mykhailo Bilousov found Belyalov ‘guilty’ of possessing a weapon and of a plan to kill Vadym Volchenko. He was sentenced to twelve years in a maximum-security prison colony and also ordered to pay a fine of 350 thousand roubles, and a million roubles in supposed ‘compensation’ to Volchenko.
On 17 December 2025, the cassation court reduced Belyalov’s sentence by a mere six months (from 12 to 11.5 years). The court also reduced the fine to 300 thousand but left the so-called ‘compensation’ to Volchenko unchanged.
He was imprisoned in Volgograd prison colony No. 19 when, in September 2025, the FSB got him brought back to Simferopol to fabricate new charges that could carry a sentence of up to 20 years.
