Ukranian consuls can not get access to the witness Chirniya of the Sentsov case

Ukranian consuls can not get access to the history teacher Alexei Chirniya who was charged with planning terrorist acts in the Crimea. “Krym.Realii” writes about it referring to the lawyer of Chirniya Ilya Novikov.According to Novikov, this is due to the fact that the same restrictions are applied to Chirniya as to the starving Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov, whom Russia considers its “citizen”.

According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the Russian side stated to the Ukrainian consulate general in Rostov-on-Don that Chirniy is a citizen of Russia, and therefore “there are no grounds for admission of Ukrainian consuls to him”.

The Ukrainian diplomats continue to seek a meeting with the convicted historian, and they have re-sent a request to the Russian side regarding it. Previously, Ukrainian diplomats were allowed to see Chirniy.

Thus, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, just over the course of this year the consuls managed to meet with him twice, while he was detained in the correctional facility “IK-9” of the city of Shakhty, Rostov region.

During these meetings, he did not make complaints about the conditions of detention and his state of health, but he repeatedly stressed to the consuls that in 2014, he filed an application to renounce Russian citizenship and did not receive a Russian passport.

Earlier, it was reported that Chirny is serving a sentence in the correctional facility # 15 of Bataysk in the Rostov region of Russia. On the night of May 2014, in the Crimea, Russian security forces detained the history teacher Aleksey Chierniy. He was tried on charges of organizing a series of terrorist attacks on the peninsula together with Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov, photographer Gennady Afanasyev, and anarchist Alexander Kolchenko.

Chirniy, in particular, was accused of trying to conduct explosive demolition of the Lenin’s monument and the eternal flame monument in Simferopol.  The North Caucasian District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced Chirniy to 7 years in a high-security prison.

2 years and 7 months is left for him to serve.