On June 13, Serhiy Stulov left the Kherson region for Crimea but has not returned home. His family can only guess where he celebrated his 46th birthday.
For the last three years, Serhiy was making money by transporting fuel. Before that, he served in the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine. He lived with his civilian wife in the town of Oleshky. In early summer, the family found themselves in a difficult situation - Serhiy had almost no work due to the Russian occupation, and his wife who was a civil servant was fired because she refused to work according to russian rules.
On the morning of June 13, Serhiy and his partner drove to Crimea to buy diesel fuel. At 11 am he called his wife and said that he was approaching the administrative border, and the fuel would be loaded in Armyansk. Later he wrote a text message: "We will load in Simferopol".
At 8 pm Serhiy’s wife wrote him a message - asking if he had passed the border. She received the answer "We are just approaching it" - and since then the connection with her husband was lost. His partner returned home alone. He said that Serhiy was detained by Russian border guards who promised to release him in a couple of days. Neither the reasons for the detention nor the place of detention was named by the Russians.
A week later, without waiting for Serhiy, his brother went to the Russian checkpoint. They said that he would be home in two days. This also did not happen. Serhiy's wife wrote letters to the Red Cross and the Joint Coordination Center. She didn’t get any replies. Calling the hotline of the occupation FSB also proved to be ineffective. And in early July, an unknown man called Serhiy’s wife. He said that he was in the Simferopol detention center together with Serhiy and he was waiting for interrogation on a lie detector. He also said that Serhiy was not beaten, but he was poorly fed. The occupants wanted to find out from Serhiy if he was reporting on Russian positions to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
On July 17, Serhiy's brother and mother went to Crimea and found a lawyer who agreed to cooperate. She said that Serhiy Stulov was accused of involvement in the Kherson terrorist defense. However, after several phone conversations with the family, the lawyer stopped getting in touch. She neither answers calls, nor even reads messages.