17 June 2026

“Freedom Has Always Been With Me”: Yevhen Zhukov, a Political Prisoner from Crimea, Has Served His Sentence and Been Released

On June 9, Yevhen Zhukov, a resident of Sevastopol and a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses, was released after serving his sentence in a Russian prison.

“Freedom has always been with me,” Zhukov said immediately after his release from a prison colony in the Yaroslavl region of the Russian Federation. 

In 2020, Yevhen Zhukov, along with Volodymyr Maladyka and Volodymyr Sakada, was detained by the occupying forces. All three were accused of organizing the activities of an “extremist organization”, namely the Jehovah’s Witnesses, of which they were members.

The charges were based on video recordings of four Jehovah’s Witnesses worship services made by undercover FSB agents. At the same time, during the trial, an FSB officer admitted that the men’s actions showed no signs of extremism or incitement to religious hatred. Despite this, they were sentenced to six years of imprisonment in a general-regime penal colony.

Volodymyr Maladyka and Volodymyr Sakada still remain in Russian custody. These cases demonstrate that Russia not only restricts freedom of religion on the peninsula but also systematically persecutes people for their religious beliefs.