Pavlo Gryb, a Ukrainian kidnapped by Russian security agents in Belarus and charged with terrorism in Russia, is suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and has lost most of his vision while imprisoned in southern Russia.
Gryb, who turned 20 behind bars, suffers from portal hypertension, a chronic illness that affects the function of his organs, and has not received adequate medical care while in Russian custody. Currently, he has lost his sight in one eye and has only 15-20 percent vision in the other, his father, Ihor Gryb, told the independent Hromadske television channel on Dec. 21.
“We are hoping for any possible (prisoner) exchange, if it ever happens,” said the elder Gryb. “Otherwise Pavlo simply won’t survive behind bars.”
Gryb, who denies the terrorism charges, was illegally detained in August 2017 when he traveled from Ukraine to Belarus to see his friend. He is one of at least 64 Ukrainian political prisoners imprisoned in Russia and Russia-occupied Crimea.
Iryna Gerashchenko, a deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, who is negotiating the prisoner exchanges with Russia, said on Dec. 20 that Ukraine had offered Russia to conduct the next prisoner exchange on Jan. 5-6, 2019, on the eve of the Eastern Orthodox Christmas.
The exchange would free 22 Ukrainians imprisoned in Russia, including Gryb. For them, Ukraine offered to release 22 Russians imprisoned in Ukraine. If Kremlin agrees to the offer, it would be the first prisoner exchange since December 2017.
Pavlo Gryb’s lawyer, Marina Dubrovina, described his health problems in a Dec. 20 interview with Ukraine’s Glavkom news site.
“His vision has gotten significantly worse. He’s practically blind,” she said. “He frequently simply cannot read documents that I give him, and he even has a hard time recognizing people’s faces.”
This makes it difficult for him to take part in court sessions and his memory and cognitive abilities appear to have been harmed, Dubrovina added.
On Dec. 12, a military district court in Rostov-on-Don was supposed to question Tatiana Yershova, a Russian teenager whom Pavlo Gryb stands accused of inclining to carry out a terrorist attack at her high school, by video link.
However, the hearing was delayed after Gryb fell ill in the courtroom, complaining of serious stomach pains and nausea. A medic concluded that Gryb could be suffering from an infectious disease or a flare-up of his chronic illness, Russia’s independent Novaya Gazeta reported. After that, Gryb received no further medical examination, Ukrainian lawyer Yevhenia Zakrevska wrote on Dec. 18 on Facebook.
As a result of Gryb’s health, the hearing was moved to Dec. 21. However, that court session was partially closed to the public.
It is “unclear why the judged closed the hearing,” father Ihor Gryb told Hromadske. “Today, they heard (the testimony) of the main witness to the criminal charge, Tatiana Yershova, who in previous court sessions…stated that no one was planning anything anywhere in any way at all, and so this whole case is absurd.”
In August 2017, 19-year-old Pavlo Gryb traveled from the Ukrainian border city of Chernihiv to Gomel, Belarus to meet with Yershova, a teenager from Sochi, Russia whom he had met on the Russian social network VKontakte.
After his brief meeting with Yershova, Gryb was kidnapped by plainclothes security officers, handcuffed, and placed in a van. Later, he was handed over to another group of people, who took Gryb to a police station in Russia’s Smolensk region, where they “formalized his status in accordance with the Russian criminal code,” a lawyer for Gryb told Hromadske in September 2017.
During a Dec. 6, 2018 hearing in Gryb’s case, three Russian security agents claimed to have arrested the Ukrainian youth in Yartsevo, a city in Russia’s Smolensk Oblast.
Gryb stands accused of harboring extreme Ukrainian nationalist sympathies and of instructing Yershova in messages and Skype conversations to make an explosive device and detonate it at her school during an assembly. No terrorist attack was ever carried out at the school in question. If found guilty, Gryb could face 10 years in prison.
However, Yershova’s closest friend, who is a witness for the prosecution, told the court that Gryb’s conversations with Yershova were romantic in nature, and not political.
Throughout his incarceration in Russia, Gryb has frequently been denied adequate medical care, access to Ukrainian consuls, and letters and parcels.
On Dec. 20, Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights, sent an official letter to Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Tatiana Moskalkova calling on her to take urgent action to provide Gryb with medical care.
The European Court of Human Rights has also demanded that Russia provide it medical documentation on Gryb’s health and the care that he receives in prison by Jan. 2, according to lawyer Zakrevska.
