Russia’s FSB are preventing Ukrainian prisoners Yevhen Panov and Andriy Zakhtei from seeing a lawyer, or receiving letters and parcels from Ukraine. Their rights, as well as those of imprisoned Ukrainian journalist Roman Sushchenko, are now even more at threat following changes preventing real human rights activists from visiting prisoners. The enforced new makeup of formerly vital civic monitoring committees has come into effect with Zoya Svetova and other prominent human rights activists replaced by men like Dmitry Konmov, who is under US sanctions for his role in the death in detention of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. They, Svetova warns, are most unlikely to provide any assistance to the Ukrainian prisoners.
It is safe to assume that the new members will also not see the need to report the presence of detainees that the FSB is holding incommunicado. It was thanks to Svetova and her colleagues that the whereabouts were learned of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, Valentin Vyhivsky and, most recently, Roman Sushchenko.
