Ukrainian Stanislav Klykh, convicted of participating in hostilities in Chechnya, demanded transfer to another colony

Ukrainian Stanislav Klykh, who is serving a sentence in the Verkhneuralsk colony in the Chelyabinsk region on charges of participating in the First and Second Chechen Wars on the side of the separatists, wrote a letter to Novaya Gazeta, in which he demanded a transfer to another institution of the Federal Penitentiary Service.

“I demand a transfer to another institution of the Federal Penitentiary Service - for this purpose I refuse breakfast and lunch, I can say that it is impossible to eat the food here, unlike what was in the Grozny pre-trial detention center - it is disgusting,” Klykh said.

He added that he knows nothing about what the Ukrainian authorities are doing to exchange or release him. Klykh also clarified that he was not an activist of the Right Sector banned in Russia, but from 2004 to 2014 he was a member of the Party of Regions.

“Therefore, I ask you not to consider me a political prisoner in this regard - at the time of entering the Russian Federation, I was quite loyal (apolitical) to the leadership of the Russian Federation and the Russian political system, which cannot be said about my current ideas,” Klykh wrote.

In 2016, the Supreme Court of Chechnya sentenced Klykh to 20 years in a maximum security colony. Ukrainian citizen Nikolai Karpyuk was also convicted along with him and sentenced to 22.5 years in prison. They were found guilty of leading and participating in a gang (Part 1 of Article 209 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), murder of two or more persons in connection with the performance of their official duty (points “c”, “h”, “n” of Article 102 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR) and attempted murder (Part 2 of Article 15, paragraphs “c”, “h”, “n”, Article 102 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR) as part of gangs in the North Caucasus in 1994.

Both convicts refused to admit their guilt and said that they were forced to confess under torture. Klykh behaved inappropriately at the hearing: he asked that singer Stas Mikhailov represent his interests in court, and sang about bees and golden domes. “Mediazona” wrote in detail about how the trial took place.

In August 2017, Klykh was sent for treatment to a psychiatric hospital in Magnitogorsk, and then returned to Verkhnouralsk.