The Moscow City Court has prolonged the arrest of Ukrainian filmmaker, Crimean resident Oleh Sentsov, the Ukrainian service of Radio Svoboda reported.
“The Moscow City Court has prolonged the arrest of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, who is accused of preparing terrorist attacks in Crimea,” reads the statement.
As reported, Russian police arrested Sentsov in Crimea on May 11, 2014. Reports on May 19 said he had been moved to a detention center in Moscow.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on May 30 that members of Right Sector, a Ukrainian nationalist organization, had been arrested in Crimea on suspicion of planning terrorist attacks in some Crimean cities.
The FSB said in a statement that the detainees, whom it named as Oleh Sentsov, Hennadiy Afanasyev, Oleksiy Chernyho and Oleksandr Kolchenko, had been plotting “detonating improvised explosive devices before dawn on May 9, 2014, near the Eternal Flame memorial and the Lenin monument in Simferopol and setting fire to the offices of the public organization Russian Community of Crimea and the representative office of the United Russia party in Simferopol on April 14 and April 18, 2014.”
On December 25, the Moscow City Court convicted Afanasyev of a terrorist attack and sentenced him to seven years in a high-security prison.
On April 21, 2015, Chernyho was sentenced to seven years in a high-security prison by the North Caucasus District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don. The cases of Afanasyev and Chernyho were handled separately because the two men made a plea bargain.
Sentsov’s term of detention was extended by Moscow’s Lefortovo Court until May 11, 2015.
On June 11, 2014, the European Film Academy asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to clarify the situation around the arrest of Sentsov. The petition was signed by about 20 show business people, including Agustin and Pedro Almodovar, Andrzej Wajda, Wim Wenders, Krzysztof Zanussi and Daniel Olbrychski.
