Russian prison doctors made a jailed Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov to start taking two spoons of nutrition mixture orally, threatening to feed him by force otherwise, Sentsov’s lawyer Dmitry Dinze reported on July 19 after visiting Sentsov.
Sentsov, 41, was arrested in Russian-annexed Crimea in May 2014 and sentenced in a sham trial for 20 years in prison on charges of plotting a terrorist attack, which he denies.
Sentsov started a hunger strike in prison in Siberia on May 14 to draw attention to about 70 Ukrainian political prisoners kept in Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea.
On May 28, when Sentsov was two weeks into his hunger strike, Russian Federal Penitentiary service announced that he agreed to receive injections of a glucose solution, the special treatment which extends the time a person can spend without food.
Since the beginning of the strike, Sentsov was once sent into intensive care. About a week ago, Sentsov caused developed a heart problem, Dinze said.
According to the lawyer, doctors wanted to put Sentsov in a hospital and feed him by force. But he refused to be hospitalized and, as a compromise, agreed to start taking a small amount of nutrition substance orally in addition to intravenous support under the doctors’ control.
But he refused to stop his hunger strike saying: “I will go on as long as I can,” Dinze said quoting his client.
Dinze added that Sentsov is being kept in a prison’s hospital ward.
“He looks worse than last time. He is very pale. He is able to walk,” Dinze said on Facebook.
Sentsov also sent greetings to two other political prisoners: Yevhen Panov, a former volunteer fighter in eastern Ukraine who was captured while entering Crimea and now faces up to 20 years in prison, and Volodymyr Balukh, a pro-Ukrainian activist from Crimea sentenced there for 3 years and 7 months in jail. Balukh is now in the 122th day of his hunger strike.
Sentsov’s mother wrote on June 22 a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin asking to pardon her son. Sentsov himself refused to ask for pardon.
