Oleg Sentsov, arrested after Crimea protests, says he was tortured before being charged with terrorism offences his lawyers say are imaginary

A defiant Ukrainian film director told a Russian military court he was ready to “suffer or die” for his beliefs, as prosecutors demanded a 23-year jail sentence for terrorism offences his lawyers say are imaginary.

Oleg Sentsov and his co-defendant Alexander Kolchenko, a leftwing activist, are accused of being part of a terrorist conspiracy in Crimea, setting fire to the offices of a political party and planning to blow up a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the capital, Simferopol.

Sentsov told the court he was beaten, tortured and threatened with rape or murder in the days after his arrest in May 2014, to force him to confess to a terrorist plot and implicate others. He refused.

“Treason and betrayal can sometimes start with simple cowardice,” said Sentsov, wearing a white T-shirt bearing the words ‘Glory to Ukraine’ and looking directly at the panel of three judges in the city of Rostov-on-Don, south-west Russia, as he delivered a short but powerful “final word” to the court. He said cowardice was “the greatest sin”, quoting Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel the Master and Margarita.

“When they put a bag on your head, beat you up a bit, and half an hour later, you’re ready to go back on all your beliefs, implicate yourself in whatever they ask, implicate others, just to stop them beating you. I don’t know what your beliefs can possibly be worth if you are not ready to suffer or die for them,” he said.

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The court rejected Sentsov’s claims of torture. In a move of such audacity it shocked even those familiar with the Russian legal system, prosecutors said they had found “sadomasochistic equipment” at Sentsov’s apartment, and the bruises and injuries he was recorded as having came not from torture but from “attempts to gain sexual pleasure”.

A father of two, Sentsov directed the 2011 film Gamer, which received good reviews and enabled him to start directing full time. He stopped work on a new film to take part in the Maidan protests against then president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013, and later helped bring food and water to Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea who were barricaded in their bases after the Russian takeover. He was arrested in May last year.

“I am not going to beg for leniency. Everything is already clear. A court of occupiers cannot be just by definition,” he told the judges.

On Wednesday, Sentsov reminded the court that the main witness for the prosecution, Gennady Afanasyev, retracted his testimony in court, saying it was given under duress.



“I was surprised and I’m very pleased for him,” said Sentsov. “Not because it will create a scandal, or will lead to our acquittal. That won’t happen. But I am glad, because he will live his life knowing that he is not a coward.”

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A group of European film directors, including Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Wim Wenders, published an open letter to Vladimir Putin and other top Russian officials this week, demanding that the charges against Sentsov are dropped and the allegations of torture investigated.



The European Film Academy’s deputy chairman, Mike Downey, called the trial “a total fiasco” and likened it to the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s. He said the academy would “work tirelessly until he gets the justice he deserves”.

“This case could go down as one of the most shameful pages in Russian judicial history,” said Svetlana Sidorkina, Kolchenko’s lawyer. Sidorkina said even if the accused were guilty of starting a fire at the offices of the United Russia political party in Simferopol, as the prosecution alleges, it should be a much less severe charge of arson, not terrorism. Nobody was hurt in the fire. The prosecutor asked for a 12-year sentence for Kolchenko.

Part of the reason for the case against Sentsov and Kolchenko appears to be to show how strongly any dissent against Russian rule in Crimea will be punished. Many of the pro-Ukrainian minority in the peninsula have left for mainland Ukraine, and in March a hardy group of activists who celebrated the birthday of the 19th-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko in Crimea’s capital, Simferopol, were put on trial for holding Ukrainian flags.



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Russian president Putin has been in Crimea this week, and on Wednesday told officials to strengthen Russia’s de facto border between the peninsula and the rest of Ukraine, citing increased threats of destabilisation by foreign forces, as well as the flow of drugs and sanctioned products such as European cheese.

Although Sentsov has insisted he should be treated as a Ukrainian citizen, the court has treated him as a Russian, deciding he automatically received Russian nationality after Crimea was annexed.



Sentsov’s Ukrainian lawyer is pushing to open criminal charges against the Russian officials involved in the case. “This isn’t just a farce, it’s a crime: the kidnapping of a Ukrainian citizen on Ukrainian territory and subsequent torture and illegal detention,” Evgenia Zakrevskaya told Ukraine’s Hromadske TV station.

Russia has about 10 Ukrainian citizens in detention awaiting trial. The best known is military pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, due to stand trial for contributing to the deaths of two Russian journalists in east Ukraine. Her defence say the claims are fabricated, and also that she was abducted by separatists and taken over the border to Russia. A court in Rostov is due on Friday to decide where she will stand trial.



The judges in the Sentsov and Kolchenko case will deliver their ruling on 25 August. Innocent verdicts are almost unheard of in the Russian legal system, and realistically the best hope will be a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine after conviction.



“Ukraine will do everything it can to free these unjustly accused people,” said Vitaly Moskalenko, Ukraine’s consul general in Rostov-on-Don, who was present at the Sentsov hearing. He said he hoped sanctions would be imposed on the Russian officials who had taken part in the case against the film director.