On June 14 a new update appeared on President Petro Poroshenko’s Facebook page: “At last! Yurii Soloshenko and Hennadii Afanasiev are already on board of a Ukrainian airplane and about to leave Moscow for Ukraine.” Soon a photo with the released prisoners was published by Iryna Herashchenko, President’s Commissioner on peaceful settlement of the situation in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. “The president’s mission is accomplished. Two more our fellow Ukrainians are released… It was a long struggle, in Minsk and at all international platforms,” wrote Herashchenko in Facebook.
Shortly before that Vasyl Hrytsak, director of the Security Service of Ukraine, had informed Ukrainian mass media that Afanasiev and Soloshenko would probably be swapped for the accused in the “May 2 Odesa case,” Yevhen Mefiodov and Olena Hlishchynska.
Soloshenko, former head of a defense plant in Poltava, was detained in Russia on August 5, 2014. He was charged with planning to smuggle sensitive equipment out of a Russian plant. On October 14, 2015, the Moscow City Court sentenced him six years in strict penal colony. Soloshenko, 74, has serious health problems, an oncological disease.
Afanasiev is one of the charged in the “Crimean case,” he witnessed at the trial of other “Kremlin prisoners” Oleh Sentsov and Oleksandr Kolchenko. He was detained in his home city of Simferopol in May 2014. First Afanasiev witnessed against Sentsov and Kolchenko, but later recanted his testimony publicly, citing torture as the reason why he was forced to testify. In summer 2015 Afanasiev was sentenced to seven years of strict penal colony. Like Soloshenko, the young man too has health problems.
“We expect to see other Ukrainian prisoners back as well,” says Polina Brodik, coordinator of Let My People Go campaign. “We have information that Oleksii Chyrnii [another Ukrainian political prisoner, who also testified in the Sentsov-Kolchenko case. – Author] was recently transferred to Moscow, allegedly for a medical examination. Strange enough, given that he was sent to serve his term all the way to Magadan. Transporting him to Moscow is a costly enterprise. As to Soloshenko and Afanasiev, before return to Ukraine they were first brought to Moscow for some obscure reasons, where they spent a long time in the Lefortovo isolation prison.
A reminder: according to the activists of Let My People Go campaign, currently there are 29 Ukrainians imprisoned on the territory of the Russian Federation and the annexed Crimea. We are looking forward to seeing the other Kremlin’s prisoners back home.
