You're reading: Sentsov transferred to Chelyabinsk from Irkutsk

Ukrainian moviemaker Oleh Sentsov, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for terrorism in Russia in 2015, has been transferred from an Irkutsk pretrial detention facility to another location, the public monitoring commission in the Irkutsk region told Interfax on September 12.

“We received information from Irkutsk detention facility No. 1 that Oleh Sentsov had been transferred from Irkutsk to Chelyabinsk today,” a commission member said.

The reasons for Sentsov’s transfer were not clear.

It was reported earlier that the Irkutsk public monitoring commission had found Sentsov at the Irkutsk detention facility No. 1 on September 9, where he had apparently been transferred from a penitentiary in Yakutsk, where he was serving his term. Sentsov was placed in a recently renovated solitary cell.

Sentsov told the public monitoring commission members that he was unaware why he was transferred from the Yakutsk penitentiary. Svyatoslav Khromenkov, an Irkutsk-based human rights activist, presumed that the authorities decided to change the location where he would further serve his term.

The North Caucasus Military Court in Rostov-on-Don ruled in August 2015 to sentence Sentsov, who had been detained in Crimea in 2014, to 20 years in a strict security penitentiary on charges of setting up a terrorist group in Crimea.