Russian citizens Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev, whom Ukrainian security forces captured following an exchange of fire near Schastia, the Luhansk Oblast of Ukraine in May 2015 and who are the members of the Russian armed forces, have been transferred from a hospital to a pretrial detention facility in Kyiv.
“They were transferred to a Kyiv detention facility yesterday,” Yerofeyev’s lawyer Oksana Sokolovskaya told Interfax on July 30.
The Television News Service of the 1+1 television channel quoted Alexandrov’s lawyer Kostyantyn Kravchuk as saying that his client “so far cannot move on his own, and the SBU [the Ukrainian Security Service] has not indicated the reasons for transferring the Russians to a detention facility.”
Alexandrov and Yerofeyev were captured during an exchange of fire in a military operation area near Schastia, the Luhansk region of Ukraine, on May 16, 2015. One of them was injured in the arm and the other in the leg. The Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged later that Alexandrov and Yerofeyev were indeed Russian citizens but insisted that they had not been on active military duty at the moment of their detention.
A Kyiv court ruled to arrest the two pending trial.
Yuriy Tandyt, an advisor to the SBU chief, said on July 28 that Alexandrov’s and Yerofeyev’s trial would take place in Ukraine and would begin in September 2015.
