The leader of the public movement The Ukrainian Choice, who is also Kyiv's special representative on humanitarian issues in the Trilateral Contact Group, Viktor Medvedchuk said he is in talks over an exchange of two Ukrainians convicted in Russia, Yuriy Soloshenko and Hennadiy Afanasyev, and noted the high likelihood of a successful completion of the talks in the very near future.
“At the request of the Ukrainian president, I am holding talks over the release to Yuriy Soloshenko and Hennadiy Afanasyev, who were convicted and are serving their sentences in the Russian Federation. We are negotiating an exchange of these individuals. In the second half of April this year I held two rounds of talks in Moscow, discussing the terms of an exchange of Soloshenko and Afanasyev for persons of interest to the Russian Federation,” Medvedchuk said, according to the website of the Podrobnosti Nedeli (Week in Details) program of the Ukrainian television channel Inter.
“I can say that chances of their release and return to Ukraine in the very near future are very high,” the politician said.
On October 14, 2015, Moscow City Court found Soloshenko, the 73-year-old former director of the Ukrainian plant Znamya (Poltava), guilty of espionage and sentenced him to six years at a high-security prison. According to the Russian Federal Security Service, he tried to smuggle out of the country secret parts of an S-300 surface-to-air missile system. The court imposed a less than minimal sentence (espionage entails a prison term of ten to 20 years) because Soloshenko had pleaded guilty to the charge of spying for Ukraine.
Afanasyev was a co-defendant in the case against Oleh Sentsov and Oleksandr Kolchenko. He pleaded guilty and reached an agreement with investigators. On December 25, 2014, Moscow City Court found him guilty under the “terror attack” article and sentenced him to seven years at a high-security prison. After the verdict, Afanasyev acted as witness in the trial against Sentsov and Kolchenko and said that he falsely testified against them under coercion.
In August 2015 the North Caucasus District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced the Ukrainian film director Sentsov to 20 years at a high-security prison for setting up a terrorist community in Crimea. Sentsov pleaded not guilty. Kolchenko was sentenced to ten years at a high-security prison.
On March 10, this year the Ukrainian Justice Ministry asked Russia to release Sentsov, Afanasyev, Kolchenko and Soloshenko on humanitarian grounds. The Russian Justice Ministry instructed the Federal Penitentiary Service to prepare extradition papers on the four convicts and said their transfer to the home country will not happen before this fall.
On April 19, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that in a telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin he raised the issue of Soloshenko and Afanasyev’s critical health condition and expressed hope that “Russia will demonstrate some progress on this issue.”
