A citizen of Ukraine who is said to have been informing the Ukrainian special agencies about the deployment of the Russian troops in Kherson Land, was detained in Crimea.
This is reported by the FSB.
According to the message, a criminal case under RF CC Article 276 (“espionage”) has been opened against a resident of Kherson Region, born in 2021. She may be sentenced to 20 years. The name is not disclosed.
The Human Rights Initiative “Tribunal. The Crimean Episode” reports that this woman may be Hanna Yeltsova abducted much earlier – in late 2022: on November 29, 2022, the occupiers captured Hanna Yeltsova, a 21-year-old student of the Kherson State University. It happened in the village of Ahaimany in the house of Hanna’s grandmother. As reported by the Center for Journalistic Investigations, one of the collaborators of the Ivanivka community, Galina Kostenko, was involved in the abduction.
Yeltsova has been kept in the Simferopol Pre-Trial Detention Center for almost two years without any communication with the family and the external world.
“The FSB must have only now got around to filing charges of espionage. Such a background with extremely long incommunicado detention casts serious doubt on any charges. In addition, abduction and illegal deprivation of liberty are a war crime. Ukrainian human rights defenders emphasize that the situation with civilian hostages including Hanna Yeltsova meets the criteria of crime against humanity”, “Tribunal. The Crimean Episode” states.
Shortly before a court in the RF sentenced a resident of the temporarily occupied Sevastopol to 21 years on charges of “high treason”.
Earlier, Volodymyr Chekryhin, deputy chairperson of the Crimean Human Rights Group, stated that the Russian authorities in the temporarily occupied Crimea have been more and more often accusing of espionage.
