SBU is trying to get to a DPR civil servant through his grandmother
On the Ukrainian side, cases of direct blackmail by SBU officers of relatives of citizens working in the DPR have become more frequent. Thus, the grandmother of an employee of the Ministry of Transport of the DPR, living in territory controlled by Kyiv, is threatened with being sent to prison if her grandson does not confess to the SBU.
Deputy Commissioner for Human Rights Roman Savchenko spoke about this in the program “Without Ties,” a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Previously, Anton Palamarchuk served in the DPR army, and is now an employee of the DPR Ministry of Transport. His grandmother, who lives in Ukraine, has recently been threatened by SBU officers: they came to the house several times and interrogated him three times regarding Anton’s life in the DPR. After the situation was clarified, the woman was threatened with an article of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement on all negotiations, and her phone was wiretapped. Employees of the Ukrainian special service demand that a resident of the Republic cross the demarcation line and surrender. Otherwise, Anton's grandmother is threatened with being sent to prison.
“Anton did absolutely the right thing. There is outright blackmail on the part of representatives of the state of Ukraine: under the guise of exerting certain influence on Anton’s relatives, they want to take him hostage so that he can pass on information, fearing for the well-being of his relatives,” said Roman Savchenko.
The host of the TV show noted that, unfortunately, such an example of an attempt by the Ukrainian side to blackmail DPR civil servants is not the only one. Some of them, fearing for their loved ones, may agree to cooperate with the Ukrainian special services.
“We have already contacted a monitoring mission. The mechanism of its activities is as follows: with Anton’s direct consent, representatives of the mission will travel to the location of his grandmother. With her consent, in order to confirm the facts that Anton spoke about, she will be interviewed. After this, they will collect the remaining facts and additional information. This could be the testimony of witnesses who saw how the grandmother was taken away, and the defense lawyer himself could be interviewed. In the event that unauthorized methods of psychological or physical pressure were used on her, Mission staff, without the involvement of doctors, can record the presence of bodily injuries.
Then, as Roman Savchenko states, a series of appeals to state law enforcement agencies will follow, in this case in Ukraine. A similar appeal, in order to maximize coverage of the situation, will be made to Valeria Lutkovskaya (Ukrainian Ombudsman - Ed.) and to the Prosecutor General's Office.
“Before this, I said that all this could be ordinary blackmail. The grandmother was simply interrogated, and there may not be a criminal case against her. After that, they wait for the appropriate answers. If such cases are repeated in the future, a kind of trend will arise. Then it will definitely be covered in the quarterly UN reports, and the trend towards systematic violation of human rights in Ukraine will be indicated,” summed up the deputy manager of the AUPRHR.
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