The Ukrainian Justice Ministry has sent a request to the Russian
counterparts asking them to transfer four Ukrainians convicted by Russian
courts to Ukraine under the Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons,
Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko has said.
"The Justice Ministry of Ukraine appeals to the
Justice Ministry of the #Russian_Federation with a request to hand over four of
our citizens to the territory of Ukraine... We do not recognize the justness of
verdicts against them," he said at a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers
of Ukraine in Kyiv on Thursday.
After that, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk
said that they were talking about Ukrainian citizens Oleh Sentsov, Hennadiy
Afanasyev, Oleksandr Kolchenko and Yuriy Soloshenko.
Yatseniuk also instructed the Foreign Ministry to
involve international partners into this matter.
The justice minister noted that at present the health
condition of the four Ukrainian convicts who were transferred to Russian penal
colonies is rather grave.
"The Russian sentences have already entered into
force and the Ukrainian political prisoners are already in colonies... Their
health conditions are grave, there is a real threat to lives of some of them.
Afanasyev has blood poisoning, they are not provided proper medical care,"
Petrenko stressed.
On August 25, 2015, the North Caucasus District
Military Court in Rostov-on-Don issued a guilty verdict against Sentsov. The
film director was sentenced to a cumulative term of 20 years in a high-security
prison.
The second defendant in the case, Kolchenko, was
sentenced to ten years in a high-security prison.
On December 25, 2014, the Moscow City Court found
Afanasyev guilty of a terrorist attack and sentenced him to seven years in a
high-security penal colony.
In mid-October 2015, the Moscow City Court found Yuriy
Soloshenko, former director of the Ukrainian plant Znamya, guilty of espionage
for Ukraine and sentenced him to six years in a high-security penal colony.
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