In Crimea, racists organized a trial of a prisoner of war

The terrorist country has again organized a show trial of a Ukrainian prisoner of war. They are trying to make him a terrorist and threaten him with 20 years in prison.

This was reported by the head of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center Eskender Bariev.

The occupiers have started another illegal trial against a Crimean Tatar and a prisoner of war of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It is about 42-year-old Seyran Asanov, who served in the 48th separate assault battalion named after Noman Chelebidzhikhan. He is accused of "participation in a terrorist formation" and is being sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Asanov was mobilized to the battalion on August 26, 2024. In the fall of the same year, he was captured near the village of Zolota Niva in Donetsk region. Since December 19, 2024, the prisoner of war has been held in pre-trial detention center No. 2 in the occupied Chongar, Kherson region. His status was confirmed by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Despite this, the occupation authorities released a video of Asanov' s interrogations and initiated a trial against him.

Bariiev noted that this is the second such case in the last two weeks. Earlier, on September 3, a court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced another Ukrainian prisoner, Serhiy Yatskov, to 20 years in prison. Both cases demonstrate Russia's gross violation of international humanitarian law and the standards for the treatment of prisoners of war enshrined in Geneva Convention III.

According to human rights activists, at least 66 people have been detained by the occupiers on charges of participating in the Noman Chelebidzhikhan battalion. The CTRC emphasized that it is actually the Asker public formation, created in 2016 to help border guards in the Kherson region. This is a paramilitary structure whose members should be treated as combatants during the war and therefore as prisoners of war, not terrorists.

Recently, Bohdan Ziza, who was sentenced to 15 years in Russia for protesting against the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, managed to get out of Russian citizenship.

In May 2022, the Crimean artist doused the facade of the Russian administration in Yevpatoria with yellow and blue paint and tried to set it on fire in protest against Russia's war in Ukraine. The next day, he was detained on terrorism charges, and in June 2023, a Russian court sentenced Ziza to 15 years in prison.

Анна Бальчінос