On April 12, the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don registered a case against eight residents of annexed Crimea for partisan activities. This was reported by the Solidarity Zone.
As stated in the case file , Kirill Barannik, Sergei Voinarovsky, Igor Zorin, Sergei Krivoshein, Denis Petranov, Viktor Podvalny are accused of high treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code), preparation, attempt or commission of terrorist acts (Article 205 of the Criminal Code). Five of them are also charged with participation in a terrorist community (Part 2 of Article 205.4 of the Criminal Code), Podvalny is charged with organizing such a community (Part 1 of Article 205.4 of the Criminal Code).
In addition, Barannik is charged with training in terrorist activities (Article 205.3 of the Criminal Code), Petranov and Podvalny are charged with smuggling explosives (Part 3 of Article 226.1 of the Criminal Code).
Elena Voinarovskaya, Olga Kravchuk and all the men, except Petranov, are also being prosecuted under the article on possession of explosives by an organized group (Part 4 of Article 222.1 of the Criminal Code).
The most famous person involved in the case is Kirill Barannik. The young man was detained on May 30, 2023 by FSB officers on the embankment in Simferopol, who put a bag over his head. The young man was taken for interrogation, during which he admitted to committing sabotage in the village of Pochtovoye on February 23.
Barannik later said that the security forces threatened to kill his mother and tortured him several times. According to the young man, once they demanded that he confess to blowing up the railway near the village of Chistenkoye, but he refused to do so. “At first they shocked me by connecting electrical terminals to my fingers, toes, earlobes and buttocks. They threatened me with rape with a stick, then beat me with their hands and feet on the torso and head,” is how Barannik described what happened. His lawyer confirmed that he saw burns, tumors and bruises on his client’s body.
Barannik’s case was later linked to the case of a “sabotage group of Ukrainian agents”, whose detention was announced by the FSB on May 3, 2023, Avtozak LIVE wrote on April 20. The security forces claimed that the detainees were preparing an assassination attempt on the head of the annexed Crimea, Sergei Aksenov, and other “top officials” appointed by the Russian authorities.
According to Avtozak LIVE, last year the security forces offered Barannik to enter into a deal with the investigation and testify against other “members of the terrorist community.” After the refusal, the young man’s charges were tightened, replacing the article on sabotage (Article 281.1 of the Criminal Code) with articles on treason and participation in a terrorist community.
Kirill Barannik needs to collect 287,000 rubles to pay for a lawyer. Avtozak LIVE opened a collection on the “At the same time” platform to help Kirill’s family pay for the services of a lawyer. “At the same time” is a platform through which you can safely support those persecuted for political reasons directly.
- Sabotage on the railways in Crimea becomes a reason for searches in the homes of Crimean residents. Security forces came to their home on March 2 , March 10 , March 11 and March 12 in connection with damage to the railway track in the village of Pochtovoye. And in May, Crimean Tatar Mambet Asan-Usta said that he was kidnapped and interrogated in the case of sabotage on the railway in the village of Chistenkoye.
- Before the start of a full-scale war with Ukraine, people in Russia were rarely tried under the article on sabotage (Article 281 of the Criminal Code) - over the past ten years, courts have handed down several sentences a year, Mediazona found out . Since the fall of 2022, security forces began to regularly initiate criminal cases under this article: the publication’s journalists studied known materials and found that almost three-quarters of them refer to damage to relay cabinets on railways. In addition, at the end of 2022, the punishment for sabotage was tightened: three new related articles were introduced into the Criminal Code, one of which carries life imprisonment.
- As a rule, the details of criminal cases of sabotage are almost unknown - information about them is mainly disseminated by security forces. In addition to the article on sabotage, some defendants are also charged with an article on a terrorist attack (Article 205 of the Criminal Code) or its preparation. From the available data we can conclude that the initiation of cases under these articles is not always justified: not all cases carry serious consequences for the operation of the railway, and some are completely insignificant. In many cases, the accused said that they damaged relay cabinets and other equipment on the roads for little money. Moreover, in some cases it can be argued that arson was a way to oppose a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.