On Thursday, May 27, the representative of the US mission, Courtney Austrian, at a meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna, said that the United States would not forget any of the political prisoners of Crimea, and once again called on the Russian Federation to end its occupation of the peninsula.
“We will not forget any of the Ukrainian political prisoners currently held in Russia, there are more than 100 of them. We also condemn Russia's efforts to persecute and intimidate Crimean Tatar leaders, including the prosecutor's request on May 24 for a nine-year imprisonment in absentia for the Chairman of Mejlis Refat Chubarov”,- the message said.
The US called on Russia to end its occupation of Crimea and release all political prisoners in Crimea.
In addition, Courtney Astrian stressed that a significant part of the Russian armed forces remains in place along the Russian-Ukrainian border, in the Russian-occupied Crimea and in eastern Ukraine along the frontline.
“It has been almost two months since Ukraine applied the risk reduction mechanism of paragraph 16 of the Vienna Document to Russia's aggressive and unilateral military build-up in March and April. Moscow refused to give a substantive response”,- she stressed.