If Russia is allowed its way, Oleksandr Hlukhoiedov will be 84 when released from a Russian maximum-security prison colony to face a further year of ‘restricted liberty’. If he survives, which is not at all likely, given the horrific conditions in all Russian penal institutions. Hlukhoiedov is the latest of a huge number of Ukrainians from occupied Crimea given massive sentences on profoundly flawed ‘state treason’ charges after totally secret ‘trials’ where the only certainty was the guilty verdict and long sentence.
Nothing seems to have been known about Oleksandr Hlukhoiedov (b. 1959) until the occupation ‘Sevastopol prosecutor’ and ‘Sevastopol city court’ reported his sentence on 29 July.
Hlukhoiedov was convicted of two charges: ‘state treason’ under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code, and ‘the illegal purchase and possession of explosive devices (Article 2221 § 3a)). It was claimed that he had been ‘recruited’ by an official from Ukraine’s Security Service [SBU] in December 2022 while in the Volyn oblast (in western Ukraine). Purportedly, on the instruction of this official, he had, after returning to occupied Sevastopol, carried out “visual observance” and photographed places of deployment of Black Sea fleet boats and “means for their defence”, and had then passed on this information to his ‘handler’.
He was also alleged to have, on his ‘SBU handler’s’ instructions, carried out surveillance of cars of Russian military personnel and to have then purchased a radio-controlled homemade explosive device and kept it in a hiding place on the territory of the city.
All of this “criminal activity” was supposedly stopped by the Russian FSB in January 2025, which is probably when Hlukhoiedov was first taken into custody.
It is not clear when he was officially arrested with most of Russia’s ‘treason trials’ in occupied Crimea over the last years having begun as enforced disappearances. The person is typically held for months, sometimes over a year, incommunicado and without any official status. Such periods are used to extract ‘confessions’, either through physical torture, or through psychological pressure and threats against the person or his / her family.
The charges are extremely similar to most of Russia’s ‘treason trials’ on occupied territory, including the extra ‘explosives’ charge. The Russian FSB began throwing in a weapons or explosives charge back in 2015, with the only ‘evidence’ in the cases of a number of political prisoners being implausible amounts of explosive material, bullets or an old pistol which the FSB claimed to have ‘found’. Although no amount of proof that such ‘evidence’ was planted or fabricated has ever made any difference to the verdict, there was, at least, until 2022, some chance of demonstrating the methods of fabrication and ensuring that they were known.
Now there is a degree of secrecy about all political trials on occupied territory, with this extreme in the mounting number of ‘treason trials’. These are held behind closed doors with it very often difficult to even identify the latest victims, let alone assess the charges against them.
It is equally disturbing that there do not appear to have been any hearings at all, If the verdict was handed down on 29 July, as stated, then it must be the case mentioned here This would mean that the first ‘hearing’ turned into the sentencing, with ‘judge’ Igor Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov sentencing the Ukrainian of retirement age to 18 years’ maximum-security imprisonment, a year of restricted liberty and a 400 thousand rouble find. The verdict is still subject to appeal, however it seems unlikely that Hlukhoiedov had an independent lawyer, and, if he pleaded guilty, why? There is no way, at present, of finding out, but there are, unfortunately, no grounds for believing that the 66-year-old’s right to a fair trial was, in any way, respected.
Anonymous victims
We at least know Oleksandr Hlukhoiedov’s name. In an ever-increasing number of cases on all occupied territory, it even that is not known. On 29 July, the notorious ‘Crimean SMERSH’ reported that two other Crimeans, whom the Telegram channel run by collaborator Oleksander Talipov called ‘Ukrainian agents’, had been convicted of the same two charges as Hlukhoiedov. An unnamed ‘court’ sentenced one man to 21 years’ maximum-security imprisonment; the other to 22 years. Talipov clearly works in cooperation with the occupation enforcement bodies, from whom he presumably received the video on which one of the men is evidently reciting a ‘confession’ he has very likely been forced to learn by heart.
