An accomplice of Ukrainian saboteurs was released in Crimea
An accomplice of Ukrainian saboteurs, Andrei Zakhtey, was released after serving his entire sentence of 6,5 years in a maximum security colony.
In 2016, he was detained in Armyansk as a member of a Ukrainian sabotage group preparing terrorist attacks in Crimea, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
The Ukrainian publication Graty reported about Zakhtei’s release, specifying that the former prisoner was allegedly not allowed to leave for Ukraine and was placed in the Temporary Detention Center for Foreign Citizens in the Rostov Region.
In August 2016, a group of saboteurs was discovered at night in the Armyansk area. During the shootout, an FSB officer and a paratrooper were killed. Subsequently, the special services uncovered an intelligence network that was preparing a series of terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure facilities in Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet. It included citizens of Ukraine Andrey Zakhtey and Evgeniy Panov. The latter, according to the FSB, was one of the organizers, and Zakhtey acted as a driver.
“On the sixth, an unknown person called me and introduced himself as being from Yura. In a telephone conversation, he told me that at 12 at night I should come to the village of Risovo near Armyansk and pick up a group of people with some kind of cargo,” Zakhtei spoke about his participation in the preparation of sabotage during one of the first interrogations. “Now I realize and evaluate my actions that I directly carried out orders from Ukrainian military intelligence to transport saboteurs and their cargo across the territory of Crimea.”
In June 2016, State Duma deputy from Crimea, ex-prosecutor of the republic Natalya Poklonskaya met with Zakhtey in Simferopol colony No. 1. Then he complained about the actions of the Ukrainian authorities, who registered him as a political prisoner, although he does not consider himself one. At the same time, Zakhtey was included in the “hit” list on the “Peacemaker” website as an “accomplice of the Russian occupiers.”
At the same time, the Ukrainian Ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova included Zakhteya’s name in the list of mutual visits at that time. All the more surprising were the requests of the prisoner himself not to use his name in political games and not to attribute political activities. But the Ukrainian press continued to talk about the torture that the saboteurs’ accomplice went through, forcing him to confess everything.
In the same 2016, several more members of the Ukrainian sabotage group were detained in Sevastopol - Dmitry Shtyblikov, Alexey Besarabov and Vladimir Dudka.
Zakhtei was sentenced to six and a half years in prison, which he spent in a maximum security colony in Simferopol. Another person involved in the same case, Yevgeny Panov, was released on September 7, 2019 as part of the “great exchange” of prisoners between Ukraine and Russia.
An accomplice of Ukrainian saboteurs has been released in Crimea.