Four Jehovah’s Witnesses imprisoned for their faith in Russian-occupied Crimea

[Isabella]

A day after the Russian FSB carried out armed searches in occupied Sevastopol, four Jehovah’s Witnesses have been arrested and remanded in custody for two months.  Although Yevhen Zhukov; Volodymyr Maladyka; Volodymyr Sakada and Ihor Schmidt are accused of ‘organizing the work of an extremist organization’ (under Article 282.2 § 1 of Russia’s criminal code), the charges pertain solely to their peaceful practising of their faith, and all are undoubtedly political prisoners.

Early on 1 October, the FSB and other enforcement officers burst into the homes of nine Jehovah’s Witnesses in Sevastopol.  Five people were detained – the men now in custody and Volodymyr Maladyka’s wife, Natalya.  She was later released, and for the moment has ‘witness status’. She later told Graty that her husband rejects the charges and calls the search of their home unlawful.  She is planning to appeal against her husband’s detention.  Zhukov was identified on Russian official documents in 2015 as the head of the ‘local Christian religious organization the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Sevastopol’.  This was one of two Jehovah’s Witnesses organizations in occupied Sevastopol that were forcibly dissolved after Russia reverted to Soviet repressive ways and banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses on 20 April 2017. 

A similar ‘operation’ took place in the evening of 4 June 2019, with at least nine homes targeted then also.  On that occasion, 52-year-old Viktor Stashevsky was arrested.  He was released from custody the following day, but charged under Article 282.2, part 1 – organizing what Russia calls an ‘extremist organization’.

His ‘case’ was passed to a Russian-controlled court in Crimea on 23 February 2020.  The indictment claims that Stashevsky was “the ideological force behind an extremist organization” and that he “deliberately undertook active measures of an organizational nature in order to continue the unlawful actives of an extremist organization banned by a court.”

Read more: http://khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1601602071