After over a decade under Russian occupation, Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula is a less free place – especially for those who dare to oppose the Kremlin.
But it isn’t just the cases of residents of Crimea that its Moscow-controlled judges are hearing these days.
Since Russia launched its unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Crimea’s penal facilities have become home to scores of politically active Ukrainians abducted from other parts of the country that fell under Russian occupation.
Here, RFE/RL looks at some of the most notable trials that took place on the Black Sea peninsula in 2024.
Crimea Resident Sentenced After Opposing 'Z' Symbol
In August 2023, Crimea resident Dilaver Salimov expressed outrage when he saw an attendant wearing a baseball cap featuring the “Z” symbol that promotes and justifies Russian military aggression at a gas station in the small city of Stariy Krym.
Salimov demanded that the attendant take the cap off and allegedly threatened to pay someone to “burn [the attendant] down.”
Footage of the incident was posted on a Telegram channel reputedly tied to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and reports of Salimov’s detention followed swiftly.
Initially, Salimov was fined for “discrediting the Russian Army.”
Charges of making death threats were only pressed against Salimov after he refused to comply with a demand to issue a video apology while in custody, according to the Crimean Human Rights Group.
His trial began in February 2024 and was closed to the press.
Salimov’s lawyers criticized a linguistic analysis that they said contained numerous errors in spelling, punctuation, and basic logic.
Judge Georgy Tsertsvadze ignored these appeals, sentencing the defendant to a year in a penal colony.
Salimov is a Crimean Tatar, a Turkic-speaking, predominantly Muslim group that is indigenous to Crimea.
In a report marking 10 years of Russia’s occupation of the peninsula last year, rights watchdog Amnesty International accused Russia of “[attempting] to change the ethnic makeup of Crimea while suppressing non-Russian identities on the peninsula.”
Moscow has done this by “restricting education in Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages, attacking religious minorities, stifling media and culture, as well as undermining representative institutions and abusing the criminal justice system,” Amnesty said, while citing “evidence that Russia has transferred its own population into Crimea in violation of international law.”
Peninsula For Prisoners
According to the Crimea-focused civic group Irade, threats of violence against Crimea residents known to support Ukraine have been commonplace over the course of the occupation.
Formal prosecution, as in Salimov’s case, is rarer.
But since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there have been a number of high-profile instances of residents of other occupied Ukrainian regions being forcibly transferred to the peninsula to face seemingly arbitrary justice.
Ukrainian activist and writer Serhiy Tsihypa was abducted by Russian forces from his hometown of Nova Kakhovka, in Ukraine’s Kherson region, in March 2022, after the town fell under Russian control.
He was volunteering and delivering food and medicine to the elderly in occupied territories at the time.
Tsihypa was held for nine months without charges, legal counsel, or contact with his family, before being forced to confess and charged with espionage.
In October 2023, the Russia-appointed “Supreme Court of the Republic of Crimea” sentenced Tsihypa to 13 years of imprisonment on the charges.
In February 2024, that decision was upheld.
Tsihypa is now serving out the sentence far away from both Nova Kakhovka and Crimea, in a maximum-security penal colony in Russia’s Ryazan region.
Oleksandr Tarasov, another Ukrainian activist, was in pretrial detention with Tsihypa in Crimea's Simferopol.
Tarasov, who was freed in 2023 and allowed to join his family in Germany, said that Tsihypa endured particularly brutal torture and mistreatment due to his past service in Ukraine’s military and security services.
Far fewer details are known regarding the trial of Iryna Horobtsova, an IT specialist and rights defender, who publicly opposed Russia’s occupation of the city of Kherson and disappeared in May 2022.
After initially denying any involvement in her disappearance, Russian authorities confirmed in August 2024 that Horobtsova had been sentenced to 10 1/2 years imprisonment on espionage charges.
Prosecutors said Horobtsova “collected and transmitted to [Ukrainian intelligence] information about the locations, times, routes and movements” of Russian military units in her home region. They alleged this occurred “from February 2022 to March 2023,” but Ukrainian and international rights groups were already raising concerns over Horobtsova’s abduction and apparent transfer to Crimea during this period.
Dmytro Shaynoga, a resident of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region, which is partially occupied by Russian forces, went missing in October 2022 and was later traced to a Crimean pretrial detention facility by the underground human rights group Tribunal. Crimean Episode
In October 2024, Russia's Prosecutor-General's Office announced that he had been sentenced to 12 years imprisonment, after being accused of providing geolocations for operational use by Ukrainian intelligence. It is unclear how he pleaded, and whether or not he had access to a lawyer. The verdict was attributed to a court in Zaporizhzhya.
Revenge For The 'Nord' Incident?
In March 2018, Ukrainian authorities detained a Russian-registered fishing vessel called Nord in the Sea of Azov for violating Ukrainian law by illegally departing from the occupied Crimean port of Kerch.
The incident garnered significant attention in Russian propaganda.
In May 2022, two Ukrainian border guards reportedly involved in that operation, Ivan Tereshchenko and Vasyl Dmytriuk, were captured by Russian forces during Moscow’s siege of Azovstal in Mariupol.
Accused of hijacking the vessel and kidnapping its crew, both men maintained their innocence during their trial in Simferopol, arguing that they had acted under official orders to protect Ukraine’s borders.
Despite inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case and the judge’s refusal to admit evidence provided by the defense, the pair were sentenced to 17 years in prison, Russian media reported in June 2024, with the sentences upheld on appeal in November.
