On June 6, 2023, the Southern District Court of Rostov-on-Don once again convicted an innocent person – a citizen of Ukraine Bohdan Ziza, who was detained in Yevpatoriia in May 2022, on fictitious charges of terrorism and public calls for terrorist activities using.
Russia’s Southern District Military Court illegally sentenced him to 15 years’ imprisonment in a penal colony, the first 4 of which he will spend in prison.
In his last speech on June 05, 2023, Bohdan Ziza condemned the Russian aggression in Ukraine and noted that he is a man of morals and principles who would rather give his life than take someone else’s. He stressed that he acted according to his conscience and only regrets that he overdid it a little and that he should have expressed his opinion differently. Bohdan urged the court not to go on a leash to the regime and not to participate in these terrible repressions.
The Crimean Tatar Resource Center, which systematically defends the rights of Ukrainian political prisoners, notes that this case from the very beginning is illegal, politically motivated and aimed at suppressing the resistance of Ukrainian citizens against illegal occupation. Any evidence in the case cannot in any way confirm any guilty, since such guilt does not exist a priori: Crimea is Ukraine and painting the doors of a building in the color of the Ukrainian flag is not terrorism!
We strongly protest against another criminal, politically motivated pressure on the Ukrainian population of the Crimean peninsula and the Crimean Tatar people, with whom, in particular, Bohdan Ziza associates himself. Such a policy of the aggressor is a manifestation of repression and persecution of the inhabitants of the occupied Crimea, including the indigenous peoples of Ukraine, who do not agree with the Russian occupation of the peninsula.
The Crimean Tatar Resource Center demands the abolition of the criminal sentence of Bohdan Ziza and the immediate release of all political prisoners from places of captivity in the temporarily occupied territories and the territory of Russia.
The Crimean Tatar Resource Center calls on the leaders of world states to increase pressure on Russia in order to stop political persecution, liberate the occupied territories of Ukraine and bring to justice those guilty of human rights violations in the temporarily occupied territories.