The parents and lawyer of Ukrainian human rights activist Maxim Butkevich, who fought as part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, was captured and was sentenced in the self-proclaimed LPR to 13 years in prison, have not received information about his whereabouts since August. His mother Evgenia Butkevich told Mediazona about this.
“The last time we saw Maxim was on the monitor screen in the hall of the Moscow appeal court,” she says. — During this time, Moscow friends began to send Maxim parcels and letters. Well, then we began to wait — they began to wait for the notification that he had received their shipments, and we began to wait for the [possible] exchange. In September, we heard rumors through completely private channels that Maxim was sent to a prison camp, but no one knows where.”
The case of Ukrainian human rights activist Butkevich. Appeal against sentence
According to the human rights activist’s mother, soon the letters and parcels sent to Butkevich in the Luhansk pre-trial detention center were returned to the senders with the mark “correspondence not allowed.” A photo of one of these returned letters with a stamp on the envelope was published by the human rights project No Borders Project.
Butkevich’s lawyer Leonid Solovyov also did not receive answers to requests about the whereabouts of his client and plans to file complaints with the prosecutor’s office and the Federal Penitentiary Service. The lawyer intends to send a cassation appeal against the court decision in the Butkevich case in the near future.
Maxim Butkevich has been helping refugees and migrants in Ukraine since 2008, then he began working in the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Eastern Europe. In 2012, Butkevich founded the human rights center Zmina, and in 2013 he co-founded radio Hromadske. After the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbass in 2014, he coordinated the Resource Center for Assistance to Internally Displaced Persons. After the start of a full-scale war, he enlisted in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and was captured in June 2022.
The verdict to Butkevich became known from a press release from the main department of the Investigative Committee on March 10, 2023. A court in the self-proclaimed LPR sentenced Maxim Butkevich to 13 years in prison — according to the prosecution, while in Severodonetsk, he wounded two women by firing a grenade launcher at the entrance of a residential building. Butkevich was found guilty under articles of cruel treatment of civilians and prisoners of war (Part 1 of Article 356 of the Criminal Code), of attempted murder of two people in a generally dangerous manner (Part 3 of Article 30; paragraphs “a” and “e” of Part 2 of Article 105 of the Criminal Code) .
«Grati» wrote that Maxim Butkevich was not in that area at all on the dates when, according to the investigation, the crime was committed — Butkevich's unit was redeployed from Kiev to Donbass only ten days later.
In August 2023, the First Court of Appeal of General Jurisdiction in Moscow upheld the 13 years of imprisonment, but decided to count the actual time of detention from August 19, 2022. That is, from the moment of the response from the Ministry of Defense, confirming that Butkevich was in custody .