Ukrainian political prisoner Pavlo Gryb’s life is in urgent danger after more than a year in Russian detention has taken its toll on his health, family members, doctors, and Ukrainian official say.
Additionally, Gryb alleges that he has faced torture in Russian custody.
The 20-year-old Ukrainian, who was kidnapped and taken to Russia while visiting a female friend in Belarus, suffers from portal hypertension, a chronic illness that affects the function of his organs. He has not received adequate medical care behind bars, and, as a result, his health has steadily deteriorated.
In December, Gryb’s father Ihor said that his son was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and had lost most of his vision while imprisoned in southern Russia.
Now his condition has gotten worse. Gryb’s mother, who is currently in Russia, managed to get the court to have him examined in the Rostov Oblast Clinical Diagnostic Center. Based on tests carried out by Russian medical professional independent of the court system, Gryb’s long-standing Ukrainian doctor, Vasyl Prytula, made some startling conclusions.
“Pavlo now has new illnesses, like the beginning stages of cirrhosis of the liver. When he was seen by a neurologist yesterday, the neurologist said that he has symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease,” Ihor Gryb told Nastoyashee Vremya on Jan. 30. “My wife said that the doctor was shocked by the condition of his health.”
Prytula believes that Gryb urgently needs an operation in a specialized clinic in Moscow or Berlin.
According to father Ihor Gryb, during the last three court sessions Pavlo has stated that he cannot take part the hearing due to serious pains in his stomach and head. During the Feb. 1 session, the court called an ambulance. As in the last two cases, the medic who arrived on the scene injected Pavlo with a pain reliever and suggested that he rest for 15 minutes. Despite that, court continued the hearing, the elder Gryb told the Unian news agency.
Political support
Throughout his detention, Pavlo Gryb has regularly been denied access to needed medical care.
Now, Gryb “is on the border of life and death. The 20-year-old political prisoner needs an urgent operation on his heart because his condition is more than critical,” Liudmyla Denisov, Ukraine’s commissioner for human rights, wrote on her Facebook page on Jan. 29.
She also called on leaders of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the Committee of the Red Cross, and the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine the push for Gryb to be given emergency medical care.
She wasn’t the only top Ukrainian official to speak out in support of Gryb.
“Putting Pavlo to trial in these conditions is beyond humanity,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin wrote on Twitter on Feb. 1.
Gryb’s deteriorating health has also attracted the attention of the European Union. Maja Kocijancic, the EU spokesperson on foreign affairs and security policy, has called on Moscow to help Gryb in a Jan. 31 tweet.
“We expect Russia to urgently release him and allow access to proper medical treatment,” she wrote.
Torture allegations
In August 2017, 19-year-old Pavlo Gryb traveled from the Ukrainian border city of Chernihiv to Gomel, Belarus to meet with Tatiana Yershova, a teenager from Sochi, Russia whom he had met on the Russian social network VKontakte.
After his brief meeting with Yershova, Gryb was kidnapped by plainclothes security officers, handcuffed, and placed in a van. Later, he was handed over to another group of people, who took Gryb to a police station in Russia’s Smolensk Oblast, where they “formalized his status in accordance with the Russian criminal code,” a lawyer for Gryb told Hromadske in September 2017.
Russia accuses Gryb of harboring extreme Ukrainian nationalist sympathies and of instructing Yershova to build an explosive device and use it during an assembly at her school, a crime that was never committed. If found guilty, Gryb could face 10 years in prison.
However, several aspects of the case raise questions about the charges. In November, Yershova’s closes friend — a witness for the prosecution — partially recanted her previous testimony, telling the court that Gryb’s conversations with Yershova were romantic in nature, not political.
Furthermore, during a Jan. 18 hearing, Gryb read a statement in which he noted that the text of his conversations with Yershova, which were in Ukrainian, had been translated into Russian very poorly, the Caucasian Knot news agency reported from the courtroom. Additionally, there were no screenshots of the conversations in the case materials, he said.
Additionally, Gryb said that a girl who was not Yershova had testified in her place in court. He also claimed that her messages to him online were actually written by the Russian security agencies.
(During the hearings, Yershova has given her testimony by video conferencing.)
During that same court session, Gryb also denied that he had discussed Ukrainian nationalism with Yershova.
Gryb also made several disturbing claims about his treatment in detention. After he was snatched off the streets of Gomel, Gryb was taken first to the woods and then to a police station in Russia.
“In the woods, when they pulled me out, they also kicked me, (hit) me 10 times in the stomach,” he said, according to Caucasian Knot. “In the station, they threatened to hang me upside down on wall-mounted bars.”
“Another man came in and said: ‘It’s you who wanted to blow up a school?’ He swung and hit me a few more times in the knees.”
During the entirety of the interrogation, Gryb says he was either hanging from the wall-mounted bars or tied to a 32-kilogram weight. The security agents used this torture to extract a “formal confession.”
During the Feb. 1 court session, Gryb again alleged that security agents used physical and psychological force to extract a confession from him, his father Ihor told the Unian news agency. Ultimately, the court ruled to investigate these allegations.
As a result, the next hearing will likely be held on Feb. 18, the elder Gryb said.
