WASHINGTON — Oleh Sentsov, the Ukrainian film director who was held in Russian prisons for more than five years, will be meeting with officials on Capitol Hill this week as he seeks to persuade the United States to take a tougher stance on human rights abuses in Crimea and the militarization of the peninsula.
Sentsov, who was freed by Russia in a prisoner swap with Ukraine in September 2019, will meet with State Department officials, members of Congress, and attend a meeting of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, he said at a briefing at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington on January 27. He will be joined by other Ukrainian human rights activists.
The 43-year old said Russia continues to hold hundreds of political prisoners in occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine, with many kept in inhumane conditions and subject to torture.
“They are not receiving normal food, they are not receiving medical attention. It is really an underground pit,” he said of the prisoners.
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 following the ouster of Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin president, Viktor Yanukovych, and backed separatists in Ukraine’s eastern provinces, setting off a war that has killed more than 13,000 since April of that year.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was swept to power in April 2019 amid promises to end the war, won the release of 35 Ukrainian political prisoners including Sentsov in September and then another 76 in December as part of a swap with Russia.
Zelenskiy has promised a third swap to free political prisoners held in Crimea, though no time frame has been given.
The freeing of Crimean prisoners may prove more difficult because those individuals are now considered Russian citizens following the annexation, said Andrih Kurkov, a member of the PEN Ukrainian Center, an NGO that seeks to protect freedom of speech.
Moreover, the prisoners held in Crimea are not well known, making it difficult to round up international support, he said.
“There are no well highlighted cases of Crimean Tatars. They don’t have celebrity prisoners among them. If some cases could be highlighted in the [United] States and become almost symbolic representatives of this group, it would be much easier for the Ukrainian government to talk about possible exchange of Crimean Tatars,” he said.
Tarama Tasheva, the coordinator of the CrimeaSOS organization, said the situation in Crimea has fallen off the international radar screen as the world focuses on the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine to settle the fighting in eastern Ukraine.
“We don’t have many countries that support Crimean projects” such as supporting local NGOs, she said. “It is a problem.”
Sentsov is now trying to use his international recognition to help draw more U.S. and global attention to the situation in Crimea.
The filmmaker and his fellow activists traveled to the UN headquarters in New York on January 24 to discuss the peninsula with officials representing various countries.
Following his meetings in Washington, Sentsov will give a speech in Utah at the Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the United States.
Russia was willing to release prisoners last year amid international pressure, the Ukrainian activists said.
The United States can maintain that pressure by using its global influence, said Maria Tomak, cofounder of the Ukrainian NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights.
“The role of the U.S. is crucial,” she said.
The activists will ask officials to impose sanctions on Crimean officials abusing human rights and raise concerns about the growing Russian military presence on the island, they said.
They will also ask the State Department to nominate another envoy to Ukraine after Kurt Volker stepped down in September 2019 amid the House of Representatives impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump, Tomak said.
An envoy can help keep Ukrainian issues such as Crimea on the administration’s agenda, she said.
The activists’ trip to Washington comes just days after National Public Radio reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insinuated that Americans don’t care about Ukraine.
Voldoymyr Yelchenko, Ukraine’s new ambassador to the United States, said he wasn’t going to rush to judgement over Pompeo’s statement.
Yelchenko will meet with Pompeo later this week in Kyiv as he makes his first official visit to Ukraine since becoming the nation’s top diplomat in 2018.
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Radio Free | Radio Free (2020-01-27T18:32:00+00:00) Former Imprisoned Ukrainian Film Director To Address U.S. Officials On Crimea. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/27/former-imprisoned-ukrainian-film-director-to-address-u-s-officials-on-crimea/
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