Last Friday, Charaz Akimov, a Crimean Tatar from Yalta, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison on charges of treason. This happened while the 32-year-old Akimov was already serving a sentence: last year, he was convicted of collaborating with foreigners and sentenced to five years in prison. Thus, the new ruling not only increased the sentence by three and a half times but also changed the charge. And it seems this is becoming standard practice for the occupation courts.

In March 2024, people wearing balaclavas broke into Charaz Akimov’s home and, after a search, took him away. Everything followed the usual pattern: for a long time, the family knew nothing of his fate, and appeals to the police and the FSB yielded no results — they received form letters stating that no such person had been detained and that no criminal cases against him were being investigated. It was only eleven months later that it became clear that Charaz was in pretrial detention, and his case had already been sent to court on charges of “confidential cooperation with a foreign state.”

“This is such a vague article, adopted after the start of full-scale war to make it easier for security forces to repress the population in the occupied territories,” say representatives of the human rights organization “Crimean Process.” “Any person who shared information with a foreigner in private communication can be charged if security forces deem that information related to the security of the Russian state. This provision has no clear criteria and serves as a universal tool for persecution in the occupied territories,” say the human rights defenders. According to their data, the new article was not popular with local security forces from the start, and against the backdrop of dozens of detentions for “treason,” only seven criminal cases of “collaboration” were recorded on the peninsula, including the prosecution of Charaz Akimov.

However, these cases subsequently underwent some interesting transformations.
Last summer, a Crimean court accepted for consideration the case of Serhiy Solomko, the former commander of the Crimean “Berkut” unit. Allegedly, he had been storing explosives and corresponding with certain Ukrainians. According to the investigation, Solomko attempted to “cover up” his criminal case with Ukrainian law enforcement agencies, which accuse him of treason. At the very first hearing of the occupation court, former Ukrainian judge Serhiy Pohrebnyak ruled to return the case to the prosecutor to change the charge from the lesser offense of confidential collaboration to the particularly grave offense of treason. On February 12 of this year, the Russian justice system, to which the Ukrainian police officer had “sworn allegiance,” found him guilty of treason and sentenced him to twenty years in prison.

Around the same time that the Berkut officer’s case was sent back for “further review,” the Court of Cassation overturned the verdict against “Yellow Ribbon” activist Ksenia Svetlishina from Sevastopol. She had previously been sentenced to five years and three months in prison for writing messages in support of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, as well as insults against the Russian president, which she had scrawled on benches in Sevastopol parks. During her arrest, messages regarding military facilities were found on the Crimean woman’s phone. This became the basis for charges of collaborating with a foreign state. After the verdict was overturned, Svetlishina was removed from the penal colony where she had already begun serving her sentence and returned to the pretrial detention center. And in October of last year, Russian judge Danilo Zemlyukov nearly tripled her sentence, sentencing her to 13 years and three months in a penal colony. A month ago, this decision took effect.

The same was done to Boris Kadochnikov, a Simferopol resident sentenced to four years. The Russian Supreme Court ruled that his Crimean colleagues had shown unacceptable leniency and sent the case back for a harsher sentence. Kadochnikov was taken from the penal colony to a pretrial detention center, where he is now awaiting a new sentence. Most likely, it will be at least three times longer: the minimum sentence for charges of treason starts at 12 years in prison.

Serhiy Lozovskyi, a resident of Dzhankoy, is also awaiting a verdict; his charges were ordered to be reviewed last summer. “The review process boiled down to reprinting the indictment, in which they simply replaced the number and name of the article,” a source familiar with the investigation told СЕМААТ on condition of anonymity.

Charaz Akimov has now become the fifth Crimean whose charge was changed from a crime of moderate severity to one of exceptional severity. Moreover, according to the human rights initiative IRADE, the Crimean man was not even taken anywhere from the pretrial detention center after the verdict — they already knew for certain that the “lenient” sentence would be overturned on appeal and that they would demand he be charged with treason.

“We cannot rule out the possibility that FSB investigators initially offer people the chance to plead guilty and sign all the necessary procedural documents, promising in return a short sentence — the one typically imposed for confidential cooperation with a foreign state. People believe this because such a provision does indeed exist. How are they to know about the established practice where the court, instead of the promised lenient punishment, significantly increases the sentence? And by then, it’s too late to prove one’s innocence — all confessions have been made, and all documents have been voluntarily signed,” IRADE experts share their observations on this trend.

However, this method used by Russian security forces seems to be losing its relevance. Since June of last year, not a single case involving confidential cooperation with a foreign state has been filed with Crimean courts. During the same period, 29 new sentences for treason have been handed down. And judging by the news of new and ongoing detentions, the occupiers have no intention of slowing down the pace of repression.