An award-winning filmmaker who criticised the annexation of Crimea last year has been put on trial for terrorism in Russia despite an international outcry.



FSB agents detained Oleg Sentsov, 39, in Simferopol, the Crimean capital, in May 2014 after he attended a protest against the annexation. A member of the pro-Kiev AutoMaidan group, he had brought food to Ukrainian troops who were barricaded inside their bases when Russian forces took over Crimea in February of that year.

Last year, prominent European film directors including Pedro Almodóvar, Ken Loach, Béla Tarr and Wim Wenders signed an open letter to president Vladimir Putin protesting against Sentsov’s “apparently arbitrary detention”.

A single father of two children, Sentsov had previously run a computer club in Simferopol until the success of his first film Gamer in 2011 allowed him to begin shooting movies full time. He and co-defendant Alexander Kolchenko, 24, a leftwing activist, face up to 20 years in prison on terrorism charges if they are convicted of organising fires at the offices of two pro-Russian groups.

At the opening of the trial in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, a government prosecutor said Sentsov had created a “terrorist group” on the orders of the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist party Right Sector. The prosecutor alleged he carried out terrorist attacks to “destabilise the situation and influence state organs so they would make a decision to withdraw the republic from the Russian Federation”, news site Mediazona reported.

He and his alleged subordinates are accused of setting fires in the local office of the ruling United Russia party and in the entryway to a building rented by the Russian Community of Crimea during the week that a controversial referendum on joining Russia was held in March 2014. The first deputy chairman of the Russian Community of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, became leader of the peninsula after annexation.

Prosecutors claimed Sentsov was also plotting to blow up Simferopol’s Vladimir Lenin monument and eternal flame memorial. Besides the terrorism charges, the director stands accused of obtaining explosives and transporting weapons and ammunition, since he allegedly ordered subordinates to create a timebomb and showed them a Makarov pistol.

Both Sentsov and Kolchenko denied the charges. “I repeat that I consider this case to be political and falsified,” Sentsov said in court.

The US, EU and Ukraine have condemned the Russian authorities’ detention of Sentsov and refusal to let him meet with a Ukrainian consul. Concerns have also been raised over defence lawyer Dmitry Dinze’s allegations that Sentsov had been tortured by FSB agents during his 14 months in pretrial confinement.

The trial of pilot Nadiya Savchenko, another Ukrainian detained by Russia in controversial circumstances, is expected to begin this summer in a city near Rostov-on-Don. Investigators say she directed shelling that killed two Russian journalists in eastern Ukraine, but Savchenko has said she was captured in battle, taken across the border and slapped with made-up charges.

At Sentsov’s trial on Tuesday, witnesses were vague about the impact of the “terrorist acts” allegedly committed by the director. Russian Community of Crimea representative Andrei Kozenko admitted he could not “name the exact cause-and-effect connection between the (fire-damaged) door and the destabilisation of the situation”. He said Ukrainian nationalists, such as those in Right Sector – which was frequently vilified on Russian television after its participation in the 2014 protests in Kiev and the conflict with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine – had not been active in Crimea “because we didn’t let them”.

Dinze told AFP that he expects a guilty verdict but hoped that Sentsov could later be exchanged for people “important to Russia”. Two other men charged in the case, Gennady Afanasyev and Oleksiy Chyrny, were sentenced to seven years in prison after reaching a plea deal with prosecutors in December.

At least a dozen Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians have been killed or gone missing since Russia took over Crimea and activists protesting annexation have faced prosecution and harassment, according to Crimean Human Rights Field Mission.