Russia’s notorious Southern District Military Court in Rostov has sentenced nine men abducted from Kherson in the summer of 2022 to terms of imprisonment, worse even than those demanded by the prosecutor. The aggressor state, which was then illegally occupying Kherson, charged Ukrainian citizens living in their own country with ‘planning acts of international terrorism’ and purportedly doing so on instructions from Ukraine’s Security Service [SBU]. The only ‘evidence’ against any of the men was that extracted through torture while the nine were held incommunicado.
All nine men were sentenced on 30 January 2026 to terms of maximum-security imprisonment, with the first five years in each case in a prison, the harshest of Russian penal institutions. It is unclear when these sentences are likely to be calculated from, as the men were all held incommunicado for a long time before Russia announced their ‘arrest’.
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