Ukrainian Oleksandr Kostenko, arrested by Kremlin authorities in Russian-occupied Crimea in 2015, was released on Aug. 3 and returned to Ukraine on Aug.6, according to an Aug. 6 Facebook post by Iryna Gerashchenko, the vice chairwoman of Ukrainian parliament and Ukraine’s representative in the Minsk, Belarus, negotiations process.
Kostenko, a 32-year-old EuroMaidan Revolution activist from Simferopol, was arrested in February 2015 and sentenced to 3.5 years in prison in May 2015 for attacking an officer of a Crimean department of the special forces police squad Berkut, now disbanded in Ukraine for abuse of power.
Kostenko was one of the first political prisoners of Russia’s occupation authorities in the annexed Crimea.
Russia’s Crimean prosecutor, Natalia Poklonskaya, now a lawmaker with Russia’s leading political party Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia), led the sham trial involving Kostenko in Simferopol.
After Kostenko was convicted, he was taken to the Russian jail in Kirovo-Chepetsk, Kirovskaya Oblast, more than 2,300 kilometers away from his hometown, in Russia’s north.
International human rights watchdogs have stated that Kostenko was a political prisoner because Russia had no right to try him for his actions during the EuroMaidan Revolution that drove Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych from power.
In March 2015, his father Fedir Kostenko publicly stated that Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) officers in Crimea tortured his son in order to make him testify.
“They’d violently beat him, broke his arm, tortured him,” Kostenko told Crimean Human Rights Group nongovernmental organization in 2015.
On March 3, 2015, Fedir Kostenko went missing on his way from Kyiv back to the occupied Crimea. In Kyiv, he gave a press conference to drive attention to his son’s arrest. He is listed missing.
While Kostenko is heading back home, more than 70 Ukrainians are still being illegally kept in Russian jails, including Crimean filmmaker Oleg Sentsov. Sentsov, who was sentenced for 20 years in Russian prison, has been on a hunger strike for more than 84 days already calling for the release of all Kremlin prisoners.
