A board of justices in the North Caucasus District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don has ruled to question Oleksiy Chyrniy and Hennadiy Afanasyev as witnesses for the prosecution in the case of Ukrainian moviemaker Oleh Sentsov on July 30, an Interfax correspondent reported from the courtroom.
Chyrniy and Afanasyev would be brought to the courtroom under a security guard detail’s escort.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on May 30 that members of Right Sector 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 Chyrniy and Oleksandr Kolchenko, had been plotting the “detonating [of] 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 non-governmental organization Russian Community of Crimea and the office of the United Russia party in Simferopol on April 14 and April 18, 2014.”
On December 25, 2014, the Moscow City Court convicted Afanasyev of a terrorist attack and sentenced him to seven years in a high-security penitentiary.
On April 21, 2015, the North Caucasus District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced Cyirniy to seven years in a high-security penitentiary.
The cases of Afanasyev and Chyrniy were handled separately because the two men made a plea bargain.
The investigation found that Sentsov had set up a terrorist group acting in Crimea as a branch of Right Sector and seeking to destabilize the republic’s government bodies and affect the Russian government bodies so that they authorize its secession.
Sentsov has been indicted for organizing a terrorist group and taking part in its operations, committing a terrorist attack, plotting a terrorist attack, attempting to illegally acquire explosives, and illegally acquiring explosives.
After being familiarized with the indictment, Sentsov did not admit his guilt in the crimes he was charged with.
