Two brothers are persecuted in occupied Crimea for their participation in a battalion

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the Russian authorities in the temporarily occupied territories have arrested 70 Ukrainian citizens on charges of participating in the Crimean Tatar battalion named after Noman Chelebidzhikhan.

This was reported by the Crimean Tatar Resource Center.

According to the <b>CTRC</b>, these arrests are part of a systematic repression against Ukrainian citizens suspected of having ties to volunteer groups.

In particular, 21 people were detained and arrested in the occupied Crimea, and 49 people were arrested in the occupied part of Kherson region.

Eskender Bariiev, Chairman of the Board of the CTRC, spoke about the persecution of two brothers from Crimea, Volodymyr and Oleksiy Settarov. In October 2023, Oleksiy, who was 24 years old at the time, was sentenced to 5 years in a strict regime colony with the first year in prison. His younger brother, Vladimir, who was 22 at the time of the sentencing, was sentenced the following month to 5 and a half years in a maximum security colony, with the first year to be served in prison and one year of administrative supervision upon release.

The brothers were detained by the FSB without any grounds - while working in an agricultural field. The boys' relatives did not know about their whereabouts for several days. "I don't think there is a civilized country in the world where a person is arrested without trial on the day of his or her arrest and immediately placed on the list of terrorists and extremists. However, this is exactly what happens in Russia," the human rights activist says.

The brothers were forced to incriminate themselves and give false testimony against each other. To falsify the evidence, the FSB also used fake testimonies of their relatives who had previously been convicted in the same case.

The Noman Chelebidzhikhan Battalion is a Crimean Tatar formation that emerged in early 2016 during the blockade of the administrative border with occupied Crimea. After the full-scale invasion, a volunteer unit of the same name was created in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In 2022, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation recognized the battalion as a terrorist organization. However, Russia is persecuting people who were members of the civilian formation that existed before the full-scale invasion.

Катерина Глушко