Anti -Fascist Alexander Kolchenko stopped the hunger strike in support of Oleg Sentsov

Anti -fascist Alexander Kolchenko, convicted of the Crimean Terrorists, stopped a hunger strike in support of the director Oleg Sentsov. This was written on Facebook by the lawyer of the international human rights group "Agora" Andrei Lepakhin, publishing a letter of the prisoner himself.

In a letter, Kolchenko notes that he "overestimated his strength." In addition, he believes that the continuation of the hunger strike would not free Oleg Sentsov, since the Russian and foreign authorities are not interested in this.

Lepikhin said that Kolchenko was very weakened and had already began to lose consciousness. During the hunger strike, its weight decreased to 54 kilograms with a height of 190 centimeters. On June 7, Kolchenko was going to transfer a colony to a prison hospital from a medical unit.

According to Lopekhin, during the hunger strike, members of the PMC and representatives of the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Chelyabinsk Region tried several times to force Kolchenko to abandon the hunger strike. Ombudsman Margarita Pavlova, as Lepakhin notes, tried to put pressure on the lawyer himself so that he persuaded the convict to stop the hunger strike.

On May 31, Alexander Kolchenko announced a hunger strike with the demand to free Oleg Sentsov.

On May 16, Sentsov himself declared an indefinite hunger strike - he demands to free 64 Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia. After that, as a sign of solidarity with the director and his requirements, the Ukrainian military Alexander Shumkov , who was accused of participating in the “right sector”, and the defendant in “Case of March 26”, Stanislav Zimovets , announced the hunger strike.

• On August 25, 2015, the director Oleg Sentsov and activist Alexander Kolchenko, who lived in the Crimea, was sentenced , respectively, to 20 and 10 years in a maximum security colony.
• Kolchenko was accused of committing a terrorist act (as the investigation qualified the arson of the door of the United Russia office in Simferopol), the preparation of the attack and participation in the terrorist community, which, according to the investigation, headed Sentsov.
• A number of human rights organizations are considered by Sentsov and Kolchenko by political prisoners, indicating the fact that the investigation was carried out with serious violations, and most of the evidence that formed the basis of the sentence was received by Russian security forces with the help of torture.