Russia is holding at least 56 Crimeans totally incommunicado in SIZO No. 2, the remand prison controlled by the Russian FSB and used for those imprisoned on political charges. Men and women are held in total isolation, without access to independent lawyers and without any official status. This is clearly deliberate and makes it particularly easy to exert psychological pressure on a person and / or to extract supposed confessions through torture and / or the threat of such.
The Crimean Tatar Resource Centre [CTRC] which based the above estimate of 56 or more on the information it has received about the sizes and number of cells, has also ascertained, that two of the detainees held incommunicado are Oleh Platonov and his wife Natalia Poliukh. As reported, they were abducted on 9 April 2025, with their 9-year-old daughter taken from school and placed in care. Nothing had been heard of the couple’s whereabouts for well over a year. Such enforced disappearances have increasingly become the first stage in Russia’s persecution of Crimeans, with the brutal secrecy in many cases continuing up to the announcement of a long sentence on mystery charges.
Marat Batyrov (b. 30.01.1962) was abducted on 2 October 2025 after a search of his home in the village of Krasnokamianka (/ Kyzyltash) in the Feodosia raion. His disappearance was reported a month later, by Eskender Bariev, Head of CTRC, with all occupation bodies having consistently, and in writing, denied any knowledge of Batyrov’s whereabouts. Batyrov is a former marine in the Ukrainian Navy. Although he was 45 when he left the Navy, that could well have made him a target for Russia’s FSB.
It was only on 15 May 2026 that Bariev learned that Marat Batyrov is imprisoned in SIZO No. 2 and that Russia was accusing him of so-called ‘state treason’ (under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code). Although he had already been held, incommunicado, for seven and a half months, it was only on 15 May that the so-called ‘investigators’ asked the occupation ‘Kievsky district court’ in Simferopol to officially remand him in custody. As their formal justification for the occupation ‘court’s’ rubberstamping of his detention, the prosecution claimed that Batyrov was involved in a “particularly grave crime” against the foundations of Russia’s constitutional order and security. They asserted also that there was a risk of him going into hiding, exerting influence on the supposed witnesses or of continuing “criminal activities”.
Although he continues to be held in SIZO No. 2, his family are, at least, able to pass food and other items of necessity to him, however they complain that Batyrov is clearly not receiving everything they bring, and he has also not been given the money they provided. The conditions in any SIZO are appalling and all such items of food, personal hygiene and, almost certainly, medication are truly vital, especially given that Marat Batyrov is not a young man and is likely to have faced physical and psychological duress during the months where he was held totally incommunicado.
He is known to have spent almost a month in a supposed ‘psychiatric hospital’ from 28 May to 25 June this year. Although any unwarranted periods in psychiatric institutions and supposed ‘assessments’ can be viewed as a form of punitive psychiatry, they appear to be a formality, a ‘box to be ticked’ which has been seen before in all cases involving Crimean Tatar and other Ukrainian political prisoners. Any such formal ‘box ticking’ does, however, seem insultingly inappropriate in cases where the person has previously been held for months or longer, without any observance of fundamental rules of procedure.
The same absurdity has been seen in Russia’s enforced disappearance turned arrest of Sakha Manhubi (b. 28.01.2000), the mother of two very small children, who was abducted from her home on 2 November 2024. She was held incommunicado and without any official status at SIZO No. 2 for over a year. It was learned that she had been officially remanded in custody in January 2026, although this did not stop Russian and occupation media from citing the FSB in reporting her ‘arrest’, as though it had just happened, on 8 April 2026. After the FSB stopped denying that they were holding her, she was moved from SIZO No. 2 to SIZO No. 1.
In all Russia’s illegal ‘treason trials’, any hearings are held behind closed doors and even independent lawyers are forced, on threat of prosecution, to sign non-disclosure agreements. Convictions in all of these cases are, tragically, predetermined, with both Marat Batyrov and Sakha Manhubi facing sentences of 12 to 20 years.
