Gennady Afanasiev

On 9 May 2014, he was detained in Simferopol. He later reported that after the detention he was subjected to severe torture, during which he was forced to incriminate the film director Oleg Sentsov and testify that he participated in the and preparation and committing of terrorist acts under his leadership. He pleaded guilty to participation in terrorist activities and entered into an agreement with the investigation. On 17 December 2014, he was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment in a strict regime colony. In July 2015, at the trial of Oleg Sentsov and Oleksandr Kolchenko, where he was brought as a prosecution witness, he did not testify and retracted the testimony given at the investigation. Later he said that before appearing at the trial and afterwards he was subjected to pressure from an FSB operative. His whereabouts after 6 August 2015 were unknown. On 14 June 2016, he was handed over to Ukraine together with Yuriy Soloshenko, a Ukrainian convicted on charges of espionage – they left the Russian territory on a plane. On the same day, the Kremlin website published information about a pardon granted to Afanasyev and Soloshenko.