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Russia Sentences 77-Year-Old Crimean Political Prisoner to 18 Years Over Alleged Assassination Plot
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A Russian court sentenced 77-year-old Volodymyr Ananiev, the oldest Crimean political prisoner, to 18 years in prison, Suspilne Crimea reported on October 22.
He was convicted over an alleged plot to assassinate Moscow-installed Crimea leader Sergei Aksyonov.
Ananiev has spent nearly three years in detention, during which his health has deteriorated sharply. His wife, Anna Sviatnenko, stated that he suffers from heart and kidney problems and other chronic conditions.
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“I constantly send him a whole pile of different medicines, from the simplest to more serious ones—for his heart, kidney diseases, and so on,” Sviatnenko told Suspilne Crimea.
She added that four people are held in his cell and that other inmates smoke inside, worsening his condition.
“He states that there are four people in the cell, they smoke, and of course it is like a gas chamber,” she described.
Under the sentence, Ananiev is expected to spend the first four years in prison and the remainder in a high-security penal colony. He was also fined 600,000 rubles ($7362).
Sviatnenko described the 18-year sentence as “mockery of a human being” and stated that his defense team is preparing an appeal. She also called the case against Ananiev and the other defendants fabricated, according to Suspilne Crimea.
Olha Skrypnyk, head of the Crimean Human Rights Group, noted that rights organizations had repeatedly appealed to international institutions and governments, including the OSCE, UN bodies, and the US administration, seeking help securing the release of Ananiev and other civilian detainees held by Russia.
“Volodymyr Ananiev is the oldest among Crimean political prisoners,” Skrypnyk told Suspilne Crimea. “Given his age and health condition, this sentence is simply a sentence for him. In essence, it is death.”
Russia occupied and annexed Crimea in 2014, a move is widely recognized internationally as illegal, turning the peninsula into a heavily militarized territory where dissent, independent media, and pro-Ukrainian activism have been systematically suppressed. Russian authorities have used raids, arbitrary detention, imprisonment, forced disappearances, and laws against the so-called “discrediting” of the Russian military to target activists and residents, with Crimean Tatars among the most heavily persecuted groups.
UNITED24 Media has previously reported how repression has intensified under occupation, with hundreds of criminal cases opened over alleged espionage, treason, terrorism, and sabotage.
Human rights advocates have documented 64 cases involving elderly Crimean political prisoners as of October 2026, including 49 men and 15 women, according to the Crimean Tatar Resource Center.
Ananiev and 71-year-old Halyna Dovhopola are the oldest among them. Dovhopola, a pro-Ukrainian activist from Sevastopol, was detained by Russia in 2019 and later sentenced to 12 years in prison on treason charges.
The sentence comes amid a wider pattern of Russian prosecutions in occupied Crimea involving alleged Ukrainian intelligence ties. Earlier in October, Russian prosecutors sought a combined 152 years in prison for eight Crimeans accused of belonging to a Ukrainian intelligence network, while defendants alleged torture, threats, and coerced testimony.
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