Alexey Chirniy

He was detained on the night of 9 May 2014 on charges of involvement in the arson attacks on the office of the Russian Unity and the office of the Ukrainian Party of Regions in the Crimean capital. According to the investigation, he also planned to blow up the Lenin monument in Simferopol. These actions were qualified as terrorism or preparation for it, despite the fact that all of them took place at night, when the buildings were empty, there were no victims and casualties and knowingly should not have been.

Chirniy entered into a co-operation agreement with the investigation, which implies the refusal to examine evidence, pleaded guilty and testified against the other defendants in the case - Gennady Afanasiev, Oleg Sentsov and Alexander Kolchenko, which largely formed the basis of their charges.

Later, when the Ukrainian consul was allowed to see him, Chirniy said that he had given this testimony under torture.

On 22 April 2015, he was sentenced to seven years in a strict regime colony.

For a long time Russian authorities recognised Chirniy as a citizen of Ukraine, as even before his arrest he had managed to write a renunciation of Russian citizenship (this was the procedure for residents of annexed Crimea who did not want to become citizens of the Russian Federation). However, three years after his arrest, in July 2017, the colony staff stated that the renunciation of Russian citizenship "was not found" and the Ukrainian citizenship of the convict would be considered invalid, after which representatives of the Ukrainian consulate were no longer allowed to visit him.

Chirniy was serving his sentence in a colony in the Magadan region, but in July 2016 it became known that he was taken to Moscow for a psychiatric examination, and in September 2016 he was transferred to the Rostov region. Since July 2017, he has been in one of the colonies there.

He was released on 7 May 2021.