A man with a first-grade visual impairment was imprisoned for 17 years in occupied Crimea. In this article, you will find out where and why Oleksandr Sizikov was taken from his home, what he is charged with, why such behaviour by the occupiers is already considered the norm in Crimea, and how human rights activists reacted to the incident. 

On 13 September, the self-proclaimed Military Court of Appeal of Crimea upheld the sentence of Oleksandr Sizikov, who was recognised by the occupiers as a member of another ‘terrorist cell’ last year and sentenced to 17 years in prison. As lawyer Liliya Gemedzhi explained, the verdict of the court of first instance did not clarify whether Sizikov could be held in correctional facilities due to his blindness and, accordingly, his first-grade disability. The Court of Appeal ruled that the disease did not prevent him from serving his sentence in prison.

It was expected that after the verdict, Sizikov would have several more days to several weeks to receive the ruling by mail from the Crimean penitentiary service. He planned to spend this time in his own home, where he has been under house arrest for 4 years. But the next day, representatives of the Russian Interior Ministry suddenly appeared, who, according to the political prisoner's mother, did not have a court decision with them, but took the blind man away, allegedly to serve his sentence. They also threatened that they would use physical force if he did not comply with the lawful demands of the police.

Lawyer Liliya Gemedzhi said that the liberty deprivation procedure carried out by the Russian security forces was pure lawlessness, and most observers drew attention to the strange urgency with which the detention took place. According to representatives of the human rights initiative ‘Tribunal. The Crimean Episode’, such a quick reaction, when the convict was thrown into the Bakhchisarai Detention Centre the very next day after the sentence, may be connected with the process of forming a new exchange list, from which it would be extremely inconvenient for the Ukrainian side to exclude a blind man sentenced to 17 years. 

Sizikov is not the only prisoner of the Kremlin who has been imprisoned despite significant health problems. Last April, civilian journalist Amet Suleymanov, who suffered from heart failure, was taken from house arrest. He is currently being held in the Vladimir Central Prison and needs surgery to replace his heart valve. A few months ago, the court refused to release him early regardless of diseases incompatible with imprisonment.

It is also worth mentioning Dzhemil Gafarov, who was placed in a pre-trial detention centre 5 years ago, despite having suffered a massive heart attack and disability due to kidney failure. In the detention centre, he suffered another heart attack, after which he could hardly get up, and when they began to take him to prison to serve his sentence, Gafarov died. 

Just three days before that, another Crimean prisoner, Konstantin Shiring, who had significant heart problems and did not receive appropriate care, died in the Orenburg prison.

The Gafarov-Shiring list, compiled by human rights activists from people in need of urgent medical care, now includes more than 40 political prisoners from the occupied Crimea. All of them have significant health problems, state the lack of adequate medical supervision and risk joining the list of those who died in captivity. Among them are, for example, Tofik Abdulgaziyev, who contracted tuberculosis in prison, and civilian journalist Irina Danilovich, who suffered a stroke after being tortured and is suffering daily from pain due to the death of her ear nerve.

The other list included judges who imprisoned seriously ill people and prisoners who executed criminal orders. Human rights activists would like to add this list to the list of persons subject to personal sanctions, but these processes are slower than the occupation courts condemning Crimeans to death. 

The Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, pointed out that even according to the Russian government's resolution, people with serious illnesses, including those accompanied by complete blindness, are not subject to detention. ‘The actions of the Russian security forces against a person with a disability violate fundamental human rights, in particular the right to a fair trial and defence,’ the Ombudsman said and called on the international community to increase pressure on Russia to immediately release Oleksandr Sizikov, as well as all illegally detained Ukrainians in the temporarily occupied territories of Crimea and the Russian Federation.

Several Ukrainian NGOs have put forward similar demands, also emphasising the need to introduce new personal and sectoral sanctions and to include Sizikov on the exchange list. But the most noteworthy is the recommendation that the international community fully support Ukraine to ensure the de-occupation of the territories within its internationally recognised borders. This will really make it impossible to ‘heap’ more and more hostages, which has been going on for almost 11 years.