A Russian court in the occupied Crimean peninsula has sentenced Ukrainian dissident and political prisoner Volodymyr Balukh to five years in prison and a 10,000 ruble ($158) fine.
The court found the activist guilty of allegedly beating up the head of the temporary isolation center where he was being held.
Announcing the verdict, the judge said that Balukh committed the crime out of “hostility to the current system of governance, as evidenced by his previous crimes,” RFE/RL’s Krym.Realii project reported from the courtroom.
The five-year sentence includes a previous sentence from a conviction against Balukh for allegedly storing ammunition.
Balukh initially attracted the ire of the Russian occupation authorities for flying a Ukrainian flag at his home in the village of Serebrianka in Crimea’s Rozdolnensky district.
Twice in 2016, he faced criminal charges for “insulting an official” after he referred to Russian police officers as occupiers.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, detained the activist on December 8, 2016, alleging that its agents had discovered 90 rounds of ammunition and several sticks of dynamite at his home.
On August 4, 2017, an occupation court sentenced Balukh to three years and seven months in prison and a 10,000-ruble fine.
Balukh launched an indefinite hunger strike on March 19, after the court agreed to reduce his sentence by only two months.
Prosecutors subsequently accused him of assault, after pre-trial detention center head Valery Tkachenko alleged that Balukh had attacked him.
However, Balukh and his defense team charge that it was Tkachenko who attacked the political prisoner.
Since launching his hunger strike, Balukh has lost 30 kilograms of weight. His health deteriorated so significantly that he could not attend his last court hearing, which was rescheduled for July 5.
Both Ukraine and the United States have called for Balukh to be freed.
In May, during a meeting with the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, Dunja Mijatović, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin called the imprisonment of Balukh and other Ukrainians in Crimea “not isolated cases of human rights violations, but a consistent and clearly coordinated policy of Moscow.”
