On the morning of June 11, Andriy Zakhtei, a citizen of Ukraine, was taken out of the temporary detention facility for foreign citizens in the Rostov region towards the state border of Russia with Latvia for the purpose of deportation and subsequent return to the territory of Ukraine. According to preliminary information, given the rather long distance of almost 2,000 kilometers, Andriy Zakhtei plans to cross the Russian-Latvian border on June 13, 2023.
Recall that Andriy Zakhtei was illegally detained in August 2016 on the territory of the temporarily occupied Crimea and in February 2018 was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison. He was also serving an illegal sentence in the territory of the occupied Crimea on February 10, 2023, and immediately after that, under escort, he was taken to a temporary detention facility for foreign citizens in the Rostov region.
Since February 2023, the Russian court has already twice appointed a several-month period for the detention of Zakhtei in this institution for foreigners, referring to the lack of proper documents proving his identity and Latvia’s consent to his admission to its territory.
The Russians categorically did not want to transfer Zakhtei from the territory of Russia directly to Ukraine through the Kolotylivka-Pokrovka checkpoint, so the only possibility that his lawyers managed to agree on – on the territory of Russia and Ukraine was to transfer him to the territory of a third country for further return to Ukraine.
The problem in this case was that in March 2023 the State Migration Service of Ukraine refused to issue a certificate to Andriy Zakhtei to return to Ukraine, so the only document proving his identity and Ukrainian citizenship is an internal passport, which does not have a photo pasted when he reaches 45 years, since at that time he was illegally detained by Russia in places of captivity in the territory of the occupied Crimea.
On June 7, 2023, Ukrainian lawyer of Zakhtei, lawyer of the Crimean Tar Resource Center Volodymyr Liashenko, addressed the Ambassador of Ukraine to Latvia Anatolii Kutsevol with a letter asking him to assist in resolving the issue of allowing Zakhtey across the Latvian state border for his further return to Ukraine and to focus the attention of the Latvian side Andriy Zakhtei is not a criminal, but has the status of a person illegally deprived of liberty by the occupying Russian regime, recognized by Ukraine and the European Parliament in the resolutions of October 05, 2017 and June 14, 2018, and in this regard asks to consider the situation with the deportation of Zakhtei given his status as a political prisoner.
We hope that the return of the prisoner of the Kremlin, a citizen of Ukraine Andriy Zakhtei to the territory of Ukraine will take place in the coming days. His wife and daughter, who was born shortly before Andriy’s imprisonment and has not seen her father in person, are waiting for him in Ukraine.