13 February 2025
Crimean Political Prisoner Appaz Kurtamet Is Tortured in a Russian Colony
The youngest Crimean political prisoner of the Kremlin, 22-year-old Appaz Kurtamet, is being subjected to torture in a high-security penal colony in the Pskov region. The occupation administration forces him into exhausting labor and prohibits him from even sitting on his bed after a grueling workday.
His mother, Aishe Kurtamet, reported this and revealed that prisoners are compelled to work for free, and any rest is forbidden. Appaz has already received a disciplinary report for attempting to sit on his bed.
“Prisoners are not allowed to stretch their legs until lights out at 10:00 PM, and they are forced to wake up for work at 6:00 AM. And this is happening in the 21st century, where slavery is supposedly abolished?!”—expressed Ayşe Kurtamet indignantly.
She emphasized that these conditions are not merely the arbitrary actions of the prison administration but rather a systemic practice within the Russian penal system, which operates through the forced labor of prisoners.
It is important to recall that Appaz Kurtamet worked in an IT company before the full-scale invasion and taught the Crimean Tatar language at the Crimean Tatar Cultural Center in Odesa. In July 2022, Russian occupiers illegally detained him in the village of Novooleksiivka, Kherson region, after which his whereabouts remained unknown. For several months, his family had no information on his condition until he called his mother from a pre-trial detention center in temporarily occupied Simferopol.
In April 2023, an occupation “court” in Simferopol sentenced the young man to seven years in a high-security penal colony, accusing him of allegedly “financing terrorism” under Article 208, Part 1 of the Russian Criminal Code.
The Russian occupation administration continues to systematically violate the rights of Ukrainian citizens in Crimea, engaging in unlawful detentions, fabricated charges, and persecution based on political and ethnic grounds. These actions constitute a blatant violation of fundamental human rights and international humanitarian law. The complete de-occupation of Crimea remains the only way to ensure the safety and rights of its residents, bringing an end to politically motivated repression and ethnic discrimination.
We call on the international community not to remain silent in the face of yet another human rights violation in temporarily occupied Crimea and to take urgent measures to stop Russia’s persecution of Ukrainian citizens.