Imprisoned in Russia, Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov, who has been on hunger strike for 121 days, drew up his will as his health kept getting worse, his cousin Nataliya Kaplan said.
Sentsov, 42, is a Ukrainian writer and filmmaker, a native of Crimea, who opposed Russia’s invasion and annexation of the peninsula in 2014. He was arrested by the Russian law enforcers in 2014 and later sentenced to 20 years of prison in a sham trial on charges of plotting a terrorist attack, which he denies.
Sentsov went on hunger strike in prison in Siberia on the eve of the FIFA World Cup, an international football tournament held in Russia on June 14 – July 15, to draw the global attention to about 70 Ukrainian political prisoners serving time in Russian and Crimean jails. The director’s demand was to release all of them, yet he didn’t ask for his own release.
Kaplan said that Sentsov wrote her recently that his body condition was getting worse and he wasn’t feeling as optimistic anymore.
“I don’t anymore believe that I will soon be released and we all will happily live in Kyiv,” the Facebook post published by Kaplan on Sept. 11 quotes Sentsov as saying. “I did not give up though, I just do not believe in the happy end of this whole story,” the post follows.
The political prisoner says that along with other symptoms that he had he now has hypoxia, a condition in which the body or some organs or tissues of the body are deprived of adequate oxygen supply.
Sentsov says that he feels giddy, his body, head and limbs go numb.
“I’ve become so advanced in medicine,” the filmmaker jokes.
Kaplan also notes that her cousin drew up his will for his artworks and says that “it scares her a lot.”
Earlier in August, Kaplan said that Sentsov rarely gets up and that everything is “catastrophically bad.”
Since Sentsov started his hunger strike, the international film community addressed the Russian authorities demanding from them to release Sentsov multiple times.
Most recently the jury of the Venice Film Festival including filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, actor Christoph Waltz and actress Naomi Watts released a statement calling for clemency for Oleg Sentsov.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the statement said that Sentsov was “imprisoned and tortured after a trial that clearly did not respect the rights of the defense.”
