It is 2018, Russia is hosting the World Cup, Trump is flying to Putin and Oleg Sentsov is dying in a penal colony

Grigory Yavlinsky’s FB page, 03.07.2018

It is the 51st day, that [Ukrainian film director] Oleg Sentsov is starving in the Labytnangi city [by the North pole], Yamal. Whatever the army of state bureaucrats invented, Sentsov is on the verge of life and death. If you he continues [his hunger strike] in the same way, a 41-year-old film director, whose fault is not proven at all, can die. Keeping Oleg Sentsov in custody is legally unjustified, poltically disgusting, and morally immoral and inhuman.

About 4,000 people die each year in Russian prisons. Every tenth death is suicide. The death rate among prisoners in Russia is about 60 cases per 10,000 people. This is two times higher than the average in Europe. Russia is leading as of the number of prisoners: there are 440 prisoners for every 100,000 people in Russia. In European countries, the percentage of those in prison is almost four times lower.

It is not a secret that, like several decades ago, the bodies of investigation, prosecution, court and execution of punishment are acting today not as a system of justice, but as a punitive instrument of the authorities, a tool of deterrence, a tool for revenge.

Here are just a few victims of this punitive system of the recent years, of whom we have learned:

Sergei Magnitsky, 37, auditor, died in the Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention centre in Moscow;

Andrei Kudoyarov, 37, school headmaster, died in the Presvnia prison in Moscow;

Oleg Golobokov, 46, businessman, died in the Moscow temporary detention facility No 1;

Vladimir Yevdokimov, 55, top manager of Roskosmos, killed in the Moscow pretrial detention centre Vodnik;

Valery Pshenichny, 56, businessman, died in pretrial detention centre No 4 in St. Petersburg;

Andrzej Malczewski, 55, banker, died in June 2018 in a penal colony in the Ryazan region, where 350 prisoners were held.

It is 2018, Russia is hosting the World Cup, Trump is flying to Putin and Oleg Sentsov (and he is not the only one!) is dying in a penal colony.

#FreeSentsov #saveolegsentsov