Georgian border guards did not let five former prisoners from the Kherson region into the country, whom the Russian security forces, during the retreat, took to Russia to serve out their sentences. This was reported to Mediazona by Aidana Fedosik, the head of the Unmode organization, which helps Kherson prisoners.
According to her, this happened for the first time: before, Georgia always let Ukrainians through so that they could return to their homeland from here. This time, five convicts at the Upper Lars checkpoint were denied for «other reasons». In total, six men were not allowed in, one more is a Ukrainian who entered Russia and ended up in a filtration camp, and now has been released and is trying to leave the country.
Fedosik clarifies that the men have been in the buffer zone for two days already: they categorically refuse to return to Russia. Appeals to the Commissioner for Human Rights in Georgia and to Ukrainian diplomats have not yet brought results.
“Among the guys there are people who take lifelong therapy. It is ending,” Fedosik added.
Last autumn, Russia, retreating from the right-bank part of the Kherson region, transported more than a thousand convicts through Crimea, several human rights organizations told Mediazona. In most cases, these people were then sent to the colonies of the Krasnodar Territory, Rostov and Volgograd regions, where they served terms assigned by Ukrainian courts.
After the end of the terms, Ukrainians are often sent to the courts, where they were recognized as illegally staying on the territory of Russia and placed in centers for the temporary detention of foreign citizens, where they can stay for months — it depends on what kind of people have are documents. If they have at least an internal Ukrainian passport, convicts can achieve escort to the border with Georgia — as Fedosik says, earlier difficulties could arise from the Russian border guards, but the Georgian service always let her wards through.
Updated at 14 :28. Updated information on the number of convicts.