As the war in Ukraine grinds on, Vladislav Yesypenko, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent sentenced to six years in prison for his reporting in Russian-occupied Crimea, has recently been moved to a prison floor “with worse living conditions and a greater cluster of people,” Maryana Drach, the head of the media outlet’s Ukrainian language service, told Capital News Service via email.
Yesypenko’s wife, Ekaterina Yesypenko, told CNS via WhatsApp that as Ukrainian prisoners of war fill up the detention center in Simferopol, prisoners now outnumber beds, forcing some to sleep on the concrete floors.
“There are no toilets or household appliances in the cells. In the cells there are more prisoners than beds, people sleep on the cold concrete floor, in dampness,” she said.
In response to questions about Yesypenko, a State Department spokesperson gave CNS a statement saying the United States is “deeply concerned” about Yesypenko’s well-being and, as more journalists are rounded up, the Russian people’s ability to access unfiltered information about the war.
“Even before [Russian President Vladimir] Putin launched his unprovoked, full-scale invasion against Ukraine, he was already trying to eliminate the last remnants of an independent media and civil society in Russia and in occupied Crimea,” the statement reads. “The people of Russia deserve to have access to the truth. They have a right to know about the death, suffering, and destruction being inflicted by their government on the people of Ukraine.”
Slipping into Crimea to report
Yesypenko’s work documenting living conditions in Crimea took on new meaning after Russian soldiers began appearing in his city, Sevastopol, in 2014, to illegally annex the peninsula, which is located in southern Ukraine on the Black Sea adjacent to Russia. After the annexation, Russia imposed a news blackout on all but its state-run media.
For safety reasons, Yesypenko decided to move his wife and their young daughter to mainland Ukraine. As a dual Russian-Ukrainian citizen, he could slip back into Crimea from time to time to report on the occupation.
Yesypenko, who worked for RFE/RL’s Crimea.Realities, a regional outlet established in response to the Russian invasion, was always careful. Before leaving, he made sure his wife knew whom to call in case he got in trouble.
Ekaterina Yesypenko said it was her husband’s “bravery, fearlessness, a keen sense of justice in a situation where your native land was taken away from you” that inspired him to continue reporting under such conditions. After five years of risky work, the Russian Federal Security Service arrested him as he drove through a mountain pass in March 2021.
Authorities said they found a grenade in his car at the time of his arrest, but Yesypenko and his lawyers contend it was planted as evidence.
Yesypenko was first charged with illegally producing and modifying firearms, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, until the FSB days later accused him of spying for the Ukrainian government. In July 2021, a Crimean court filed charges against Yesypenko saying he was caught transporting explosives but making no mention of his alleged espionage.
Alexey Ladin, a lawyer who worked with Yesypenko soon after he was arrested, said authorities accused the journalist of carrying explosives to defend himself against the government in Crimea. “It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad,” Ladin told CNS, speaking between trials that have him shuttling across Russia as the number of political prisoners grows.
OVD-Info, a human rights project that tracks political arrests in Russia, says more than 15,000 people have been arrested there since the war began Feb. 24 for speaking out against or protesting the invasion.
Would rather be reporting on the war
Yesypenko’s sister, Larisa Krupina, is living in Germany after escaping the Russian bombardment of Irpin. A freelancer for a Ukrainian publication, Facts and Comments, she said she has heard from her brother only via mail.
“In his letters, he regrets that now, during the war, he is not together with his Ukrainian people, that a Russian prison and an unjust sentence have taken away such an opportunity from him,” she said.
Yesypenko is being held in a pre-trial detention center in Simferopol, Crimea. In an interview last June with a Crimean news outlet, Krupina described the jail as “tolerable,” but his wife now describes it as a damp, overcrowded facility filled with Ukrainian prisoners of war. Ekaterina Yesypenko sends her husband medicine for kidney stones and worries the prison’s medical staff isn’t keeping prisoners sick with COVID-19 away from the healthy ones.
As his trial unfolded, Ladin said, support from new lawyers and media watchdogs encouraged Vladislav Yesypenko to argue his case in court despite knowing that doing so could result in a heavier sentence.
In February, a Simferopol court sentenced Yesypenko to six years in prison for possessing and transporting explosives. Yesypenko and his family said they believed the judge rushed the verdict in an effort to bury his case in an already heavily filtered news feed, according to his wife. Now, lawyers are trying to appeal the sentence before Yesypenko is transferred to a penal colony in Russia.
Meanwhile, on May 23, Yesypenko received the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award, an honor given to writers imprisoned for their work. The award serves to pressure governments to release politically persecuted writers, according to RFE/RL.
“Shocked and beaten” by authorities, lawyer alleges
Freedom House rates Crimea “Not Free” in its 2021 Freedom of the World survey based on its closed-off political system, dysfunctional government, few civil liberties and a lack of independent media. Local journalists are prevented from questioning Russia’s seizure of Crimea, and outside information is not easily accessible.
Russia has designated RFE/RL as a “foreign agent,” a label often used to silence Western media in Russia. This designation has cost RFE/RL millions of dollars in fines.
The 2012 “foreign agents” law’s recent expansion is retaliation, some say, for the United States requiring RT America, Sputnik and other Russian-funded outlets to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 2017 after U.S. intelligence agencies asserted they were being used to try to sway the 2016 election.
Maria Tomak is a Ukrainian human rights activist who leads the National Office of the Crimea Platform, a government initiative focused on monitoring the occupation of Crimea. She told CNS that false charges are often drawn up against political prisoners and that trials include unsubstantiated accusations of terrorism, extremism and political subversion.
Yesypenko told Ladin he was beaten and shocked by Russian agents for two days, according to Ladin, but that his allegations were never investigated.
“As with any other case in Crimea starting from 2014, all of the statements of all of the politically prosecuted people that they were tortured, [were] not investigated at all,” Tomak said.
The Russian embassy in Washington did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Yesypenko’s case or his allegations of mistreatment by authorities in Crimea.
Ladin said it’s not unusual for Russia to levy false charges in politically motivated cases. Often, the FSB will put forward “secret witnesses,” he explained, whose identities are said to be withheld for fear of their safety. Such witnesses are actually FSB officers, Ladin said.
In that way, Yesypenko’s story is quite ordinary. Many Ukrainian journalists and activists arrested in Crimea have alleged mistreatment at the hands of the Russian authorities. Just eight days after his arrest, Yesypenko haggardly told a Russian television station that he was indeed a spy for Ukraine. But a jailhouse letter posted on Facebook by his wife five months later tells a different story.
“There are more than a hundred of us here: Ukrainians, Russians, Crimean Tatars,” he wrote. “Many of us were tortured, threatened with physical destruction … so that we would only confess what we did not do and betray our homeland.”
“We resist as much as we can, refute what we have said under torture, report our truth to the courts and write letters freely so you know: we don’t give up,” Yesypenko continued. “But sometimes it is very difficult. Very. There is no greater insult than when a man is brought to the position of a speechless, lawless animal.”
Translation help provided by Julia Nikhinson and Katia Pechenkina.