Volodymyr Balukh has been on a hunger strike since March 19. There have been reports that the health of the 47-year-old pro-Kyiv activist imprisoned by Russian occupation authorities in Ukraine’s Crimea is in decline. Mr. Balukh was sentenced in January to three years and seven months in a penal colony after being convicted on a weapons-and-explosives possession charge in a case that he says was politically motivated. That motivation appears to have been the fact that Mr. Balukh erected a Ukrainian flag in his yard and affixed a sign to his house that read 18 Heavenly Hundred St. Soon afterwards, the Russian FSB conducted a search of his property and found explosives and 90 bullets in his attic. The case against him, his lawyers say, was fabricated.
The human rights ombudsman for the Verkhovna Rada, Lyudmyla Denysova, said back on April 30 that Mr. Balukh urgently needs a medical examination and that a Crimean court had denied a request by his lawyers that he be given medical care. On May 3, Chargé d’Affaires, ad interim, Harry Kamian of the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, speaking before the organization’s Permanent Council in Vienna, emphasized that the U.S. “remains concerned about Volodymyr Balukh, who is still on hunger strike and has reportedly been remanded to a ‘punishment cell.’ We are concerned by credible reports that four people died in April under suspicious circumstances in Symferopol’s Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 1, where Mr. Balukh is held, including two Crimean Tatars. Occupation authorities have purportedly concluded that all of these deaths were suicides. Given prior allegations of torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, poor conditions and other abuses at this facility, we call on Russian occupation authorities to conduct a thorough and independent investigation into these deaths.”
The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group also reported on conditions at that facility: “As of April 19, there have been four unnatural deaths in the Symferopol SIZO [remand prison] in Russian-occupied Crimea. This SIZO has become notorious over the past four years for the ever-increasing number of political prisoners held there in appalling conditions. …the Crimean Human Rights Group reports that it has learned from a number of independent sources of the deaths of four men, two of them Crimean Tatars. …Concerns have long been expressed about the conditions in the Symferopol SIZO, where Russia is currently holding at least 30 Crimean Tatars and other Ukrainians in effectively indefinite detention.”
And the number of political prisoners continues to grow.
This past week we learned about the latest case against a pro-Ukrainian Crimean activist. On May 4, Ihor Movenko was found guilty of “extremism” and was sentenced to two years in prison for his pro-Ukrainian comments on social media. RFE/RL reported that the charges stem from comments Mr. Movenko posted in the “Crimea is Ukraine” group on the social network VKontakte in 2016.
“If I’m not mistaken, this is the first time someone has been imprisoned for comments made on social media,” Darya Sviridova of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union was quoted as saying by the Crimean Desk of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service. “Obviously, a Ukrainian citizen is being persecuted for taking a pro-Ukrainian position on occupied territory,” she added. (Think about that: Any one of you readers who is active on social media in defense of Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity could, in the Russkiy Mir [Russian World], face imprisonment for merely expressing an opinion.)
Messrs. Balukh and Movenko are among dozens of Crimeans who have been persecuted and prosecuted by Russia and its proxies in an attempt to silence dissent. No wonder that Human Rights Watch has described Crimea, since its annexation by Russia in March 2014, as “a black hole where human rights are in freefall.”