Journalist of the Kyiv online newspaper “Strana” Valeria Ivashkina shared the details of the shocking confession of the so-called ex-militant. ATO and Ukrainian Armed Forces volunteer Sergei Serikov, who said at the OSCE conference on freedom of speech in Kyiv that in 2014 he transported explosives to Crimea for Oleg Sentsov, convicted in Russia.
She wrote about this on her blog, recalling that a man in camouflage spoke at the event and said that it was he who brought Sentsov “what he was convicted for.”
“This man attracted attention even before he took the floor. He was clarifying something loudly, and when he spoke, in response to a request to quickly move on to the question, he said: “I have a shell shock, I can’t hear you.” After the session, I approached him and asked him who he was, what he was carrying, how it happened, when, where he hid the cargo, at whose request he did it, what happened after Sentsov’s arrest and why he decided to talk about it.
He looked like a person who had experienced severe psychological trauma, who had such a hard time with his moral burden that he wanted to free himself from it, albeit at the cost of his own freedom,” said Ivashkina.
She also noted that during a conversation with Serikov, former Maidan activist, co-coordinator of the “Media Initiative for Human Rights” Maria Tomac (pictured below) approached them and “asked for his phone number and told him that it was not a good idea to talk that Sentsov is connected with explosives.”
“In response, he said that he knew the legal subtleties and therefore did not utter the word “explosives.” The head of the Center for Information on Human Rights, Tatyana Pechenchik, said that the man in camouflage disappeared somewhere immediately after the speech. This is wrong. He stood first in the hall, then on the terrace, and to check the information, Pechenchik had only to ask Maria Tomac, who spoke with her at this session.
Journalist Irina Romaliyskaya called the news from “Strana” “another provocation of the Russians”, and as proof she cited an argument that proves that this statement needs to be paid attention to. Serikov is not a random person in Sentsov’s story. Back in 2014, for some reason, he was considered as a person involved in the Sentsov case. Then he publicly stated that he did not bring explosives. Now, for some reason, he has changed his words,” the journalist points out.
At the same time, she is convinced that a journalist should not ignore such sensational statements.
“If he ignores this, then he is a supporter of a version that does not coincide with the one voiced, and allows his views to prevail over his duty. If a journalist does not ignore such confessions, if he checks the information and writes material, this does not mean that he agrees with what was said. This suggests that he is a journalist,” sums up Ivashkina.