A Russian-controlled court in occupied Crimea illegally sentenced Ivan Yatskin, a Ukrainian citizen, to 11 years in a maximum-security prison and 1 year of administrative supervision for alleged espionage.
Occupants say Yatskin collected Russia’s state secrets and transferred that information to Ukraine.
“This illegal verdict of the so-called court is a demonstration of the systemic political repressions of the occupying power against our citizens, who freely express their pro-Ukrainian position on the territory of the temporarily occupied Crimea,” Ukraine’s Ombudswoman Ludmyla Denisova wrote on Facebook.
Denisova said the case against Yatskin is fabricated, and called on the international community to pressure Russia to free all Ukrainian political prisoners.
Yatskin was arrested in 2019 in a village near Russian-occupied Simferopol and accused of treason. Russian police alleged that Yatskin collected personal data of employees of the so-called Ministry of Internal Affairs in Crimea, and transferred it to Ukraine at the request of Ukraine’s Security Service.
The case was heard behind closed doors. Yatskin’s lawyer, Nikolai Polozov, had to sign a non-disclosure agreement and couldn’t share the details of the case. No information about the court proceedings was made available.
Ukraine’s Security Service denied its alleged cooperation with Yatskin, according to online news medium Graty.
Yatskin’s lawyer said they plan to appeal the sentencing.
In February, Denisova said that 109 Ukrainian citizens were political prisoners of the Kremlin in Russia and occupied Crimea. At the time, 75 of them were Crimean Tatars.
