A 25-year-old Crimean Tatar woman is called a "spy" by the FSB and convicted. Research points to her innocence.
Moscow - Is she a spy for Ukraine? Or was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Russian intelligence celebrated the capture of a woman in Crimea as a coup - but doubts are growing that she is really a Ukrainian agent. According to reports, at the time of her arrest five months ago, she was only on her way to her sick father. She has been in custody since December 2022.
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) released a video on Tuesday (16 May) purporting to show a "detained Ukrainian spy". The state news agency RIA Novosti also posted it online. The 25-year-old had "transmitted information about Russian military facilities and equipment of the eastern group of troops," it said. According to some reports, the woman was detained and charged with espionage in Moscow.
Leniye Umerowa - was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Perhaps wrongly. According to independent Russian media outlet Mediazona, the person in the video is most likely Leniye Umerova, a Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian citizen who was detained by Russian intelligence services at the Verkhni Lars border crossing on the Russian-Georgian border in December 2022.
The Ukrainian newspaper Grati reported that Umerova had tried to travel to annexed Crimea to visit her father, who was suffering from cancer. The accusation of "espionage" is "nonsensical, since Umerova has been effectively imprisoned since she tried to enter Russia from Georgia," writes the human rights organization "Human Rights in Ukraine". "In this case (as in most, if not all), the only 'secret' is the lack of any justification for the charges."
According to Umerova's brother Aziz, Russian authorities fined her for violating the country's border rules and ordered her deportation. Umerova was reportedly held in a temporary detention center for foreigners near Vladikavkaz until mid-March, when the deportation order was lifted. When she left the detention centre, Umerova was arrested by four men who put a sack over her head and took her away in a vehicle.
Leniye Umerova is called a "spy" by the FSB. © Twitter/Lutfiye Zudiyeva
Richter allegedly declared blind people and nurses "terrorists" and "spies"
But according to the reports, this was only the beginning of the ordeal of the probably wrongly accused "spy": In the following weeks, courts in Vladikavkaz repeatedly sentenced Umerova to 15 days in prison for alleged disobedience to the police. At the beginning of May, according to Meduza, relatives reported after detention visits that Umerova had been taken away by FSB agents.
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The decision to charge her as a "spy" was made by Judge Sergei Ryabtsev, according to a tweet by journalist Lutfiye Zudiyeva. In July 2020, he also had the former Kommersant and Vedomosti journalist Ivan Safronov, adviser to the head of Roskosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, arrested. She reports on unusual criminal cases as far as the judge is concerned: "Blind people with disabilities and Crimean Tatar fathers of large families as 'terrorists', a nurse from Feodosiya with 'explosives in a glasses case', a pensioner 'spy' from Sevastopol." (cgsc)
A court in Moscow has sentenced a Colombian to five years and two months in prison for allegedly "discrediting the Russian armed forces".