The Southern District Military Court, located in Rostov-on-Don, sentenced Ukrainian soldier Pavel Zaporozhets, who was kidnapped in Kherson, to 12 years in prison. A TASS correspondent reported this from the courtroom.
33-year-old Zaporozhets, according to relatives, fought in eastern Ukraine, in the ATO zone, until 2017, and after that he worked as a lawyer. The Kherson resident himself added in court that after the full-scale invasion of Russia, he entered into an agreement with Ukrainian intelligence and carried out combat missions for them when the city was captured by Russia.
Zaporozhets was detained on the night of May 9, 2022. According to him, he was going to set up a tripwire with two grenades on the road and blow up a patrol of military equipment. Because of the curfew, civilians could not be harmed by the explosion, he noted. The FSB accused the man of preparing an explosion during the Immortal Regiment rally on the afternoon of May 9.
“For three months I was illegally detained by the occupying forces in the Kherson temporary detention center, where I was subjected to torture, beatings, and electric shocks,” Pavel Zaporozhets described what happened to him after his detention. — During my stay in the temporary detention center, Russian military personnel falsified evidence, the protocol was printed without my presence and was blatantly handed to me under threats of torture to sign. As for material evidence, Russian servicemen came to me and, under threats of beatings, put grenades in my hands, which are now included in the case as material evidence.”
After this, the Ukrainian was taken to the Simferopol pre-trial detention center in Crimea in August. where Ukrainians kidnapped in the occupied territories were kept. It was then that a criminal case was initiated. “I was illegally transported across the border <…> [to Crimea], with a bag on his head and his hands chained behind his back. There I was taken to the FSB building, where operatives talked to me, making it clear that if I did not repeat the same testimony, everything that happened would happen again,” the man recalled.
Since until September 2022 Russia formally recognized the occupied regions as its own, Zaporozhets was tried under the article on “international terrorism” (part 3 of article 30, part 1 of article 361 of the Criminal Code). Lawyer Alexey Ladin asked to discontinue the case and recognize the defendant as a prisoner of war, since at the time of his arrest Zaporozhets was carrying out a combat order from the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine; the court refused this.