Verkhovna Rada First Deputy Speaker and Ukraine’s representative in the humanitarian subgroup of the Trilateral Contact Group Iryna Gerashchenko has said she is sure that militants used torture to extract the confession of “espionage” from Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev.
She said that Kyiv would demand at a TCG meeting in Minsk that OSCE coordinator Toni Frisch be urgently granted access to the journalist.
“The militants extracted the ‘confession of espionage’ from journalist Stanislav Aseev. This horror was shown on Russian propaganda TV. I have no doubt that these ‘confessions’ were extracted under torture. Stanislav is kept in complete isolation. His relatives, the OSCE, the ICRC have no access to him,” she wrote on her Facebook page on Saturday, adding that it is not allowed to transfer letters and parcels from relatives and friends to Aseev.
Gerashchenko also added: “In Minsk, we will draw the Russians’ attention to the actions of their proxies from ORDLO, who are torturing the journalist. We will demand that OSCE coordinator Toni Frisch be immediately granted access to Stas.”
Earlier, Rossiya 24 published a video on its YouTube channel in which Aseyev (Vasin), a journalist and publicist from Donetsk held in occupied part of Donetsk region, confessed to “working for Ukrainian intelligence.”
“The article under which I am accused according to the ‘DPR’ legislation is ‘espionage.’ In this case, I admit these charges. I do not deny them and openly say that I really worked for the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine,” Aseyev.
Contact with Aseyev was lost in early June 2017. In mid-July, “DPR” militants confirmed that Aseyev was detained on suspicion of espionage and was staying with them.
