Brutal torture alleged as five Ukrainians face Russian 'baseless' terror charges
Five Ukrainian men from the city of Melitopol have gone on trial in Russia accused of plotting acts of terrorism. Their Russian lawyers say the charges have no foundation, and they've been tortured.
Five men from the occupied Ukrainian city of Melitopol have gone on trial in Rostov-on-Don, accused of involvement in a underground terrorist group. Known as the Melitopol Five, the men were all taken from their homes in Ukraine by occupying Russian forces and forcibly transferred to Russia. Their lawyers say the charges against them have no basis and that the men have been subjected to torture. The men deny the charges and say they did not even know each other prior to their detention.
In April 2022 Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced it had foiled a plot to attack a humanitarian aid convoy near Melitopol in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine.
The FSB released a video apparently showing a man confessing to his involvement in the alleged planned attack. The man stares into space without blinking. 'What was the plan for the car?' a voice off-camera asks him. 'The device mentioned was supposed to be packed with explosives in the front bumper to strike vehicles at a distance of five metres,” the man replies. He speaks in a monotone, as if he is reciting from memory.
The man in the video is 36-year old Igor Gorlov, a military engineer serving with Unit A2558, a specialist Ukrainian army engineering team based on the outskirts of Melitopol.
When the town was occupied by the Russian Army in February 2022 all Ukrainian Army units stationed in the area were ordered to leave.
Gorlov was off base on leave on the day of the invasion, and unable to get a back to rejoin his unit before they withdrew from Melitopol. As a result, he was left behind.
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After an aborted attempt to drive out of town in his own car, Gorlov went into hiding.
His mother Irina told the BBC that from this point, she rarely saw her son.
The occupying Russian forces were actively searching for any remaining Ukrainian soldiers, and checking names and addresses in files at military drafting offices across the city. Gorlov needed to keep a very low profile in order to stay safe.
“We didn’t speak very often,” says Irina Gorlova. ”Sometimes he’d come to the flat, kiss me, and say 'I am all right, I am alive'. I knew I couldn't ask him anything. Sometimes I would get a smiley by phone. That's how I knew he was alive.”
In April 2022 the messages stopped. Worried, Irina went to her son's house. A neighbour told her Igor had been seen at the flat, but he had been brought there by Russian soldiers.
Cache of weapons
According to the prosecution Gorlov was arrested on 6 April by a garage, belonging to his grandfather where, investigators claim, a large cache of ammunition was found - mines, pistols, heavy machine guns, grenades, explosive and even an 'Igla' MANPAD launcher.
At the start of the trial, which is taking place in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, Gorlov accepted that weapons had been found in the garage, but categorically denied that he was involved in any terrorist activity.
The prosecution claims Gorlov had driven a car into the garage and was planning to pack it with explosives prior to carrying out an attack on a humanitarian aid convoy.
His mother told the BBC that the charges didn’t make sense. “That garage is in an area that nobody could get to because it’s completely surrounded by Russian troops,” she said.
“They are saying he took weapons from his military base in March. How could he have gone back to the base in March when it was already occupied by the Russians?”
‘Baseless accusations’
In the dock alongside Igor Gorlov, there are four other men from Melitopol.
Their lawyers say the five men did not even known each other before being detained. And they describe the charge that they were all conspiring together to commit acts of terror as ‘baseless’.
45-year-old Andrei Golubev is a martial arts instructor, who served briefly in the Ukrainian border troops in 2021 and, by law, was enlisted into the territorial defence forces after his contract ended.
Alexander Zhukov, 54, also had a recent military contract.
Vladimir Zuev, 44, worked in a company which ran city CCTV cameras.
The oldest of the defendants, 62-year-old Yuri Petrov, is a military veteran.
Lawyers say that all of them stayed in Melitopol for personal reasons - because of elderly relatives or poor health.
Their whereabouts after detention were a mystery for several weeks and the relatives could not find any information about the arrested or the charges they were facing. Only later it transpired that for a month the five were being held with absolutely no formal procedure or access to lawyers.
Some were held in a basement of a building in Melitopol, led in and out for questioning blindfolded. Vera Goncharova, the lawyer for Yuri Petrov, says her client was not physically abused, most probably because of his age. But he heard screams from other detainees. Andrei Golubev told his lawyer he had been subject to mistreatment.
‘Begged not to save him’
Igor Gorlov was treated worst of all.
In late April 2022, a Melitopol telegram channel shared a grim story. It said Russian soldiers had brought an unnamed Ukrainian military prisoner to the local hospital. "The lad was tortured so much that he tried to cut his wrists and damaged an artery. He was brought into surgery and was operated by a surgeon with armed Russian soldiers next to the table". The story contained a chilling detail - the prisoner had apparently begged the civilian doctors not to save his life, because he knew that as soon as he left hospital, the torture would continue.
Russian lawyer Maria Eismont, who is now Gorlov’s lawyer, remembers reading the post.
"Out of thousands of reports on Telegram that one somehow stuck in my memory,” she says. “When, five months later, I met Igor and he told me what happened, this report came back into my head. I searched for it on Telegram for a long time, using, I think, the phrase 'begged not to save him'. I found it and showed it to him and asked: 'That was you, right?' He said 'Yes'.”
During those first weeks of detention the Russians were gathering evidence, completely unbound by any legal restraints. According to Vera Goncharova, the detainees were taken to the garage where the arms cache was found and were told to hold some of the weapons, photographing and videotaping the detainees. Later, those shots were presented as proof of the criminal plan.
Gorlov was returned from surgery and put back into the basement, handcuffed to a heating radiator. At some point he was brought back to the garage and was told to put explosives into an old hatchback car. Right after that, the video of his 'confession' describing the alleged terror plot, was recorded.
On 20 April the five men were taken from Melitopol to annexed Crimea, and it was only at that point that they were formally charged. At the time of the alleged crime there weren't any Russian law enforcement bodies in occupied Melitopol who could have conducted a procedurally correct investigation.
Four months later, in August, the men’s families were finally told that they had been transferred to an FSB prison in Moscow.
Charged with breaking ‘peaceful coexistence’
The Melitopol Five have been charged with belonging to a terrorist group and involvement in an act of international terror. The latter presumes that the crime would have been committed outside of Russia's border but aiming to 'break down the peaceful coexistence of state and nations' (as described by the Russian Criminal Code).
As the plot has not been put into action the prosecution now defines the crime as preparing for the act of terror, which, according to investigation, was supposed to happen in places where Russian troops were stationed and the areas where food aid parcels were distributed to civilians. Combined, the punishment for each of the accused can amount to 25 years of jail.
The Ukrainians say that any 'peaceful coexistence' in Melitopol ended when Vladimir Putin launched the war and Russian army started bombing this and other Ukrainian cities.
According to the investigation, the alleged conspiracy was headed by a man called Vladimir Minko, who, before the Russian invasion of 2022, was the chair of Melitopol groups uniting military veterans and those who have been involved in fighting Russia-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine under so called Anti-Terrorist Operation since 2014. Minko remains in Ukraine and is fighting the Russians in the territorial defence army.
The case says that it was Minko’s idea to pack a car with explosives and to leave it near the spot where food parcels were being handed out. Gorlov‘s job, according the prosecution, was to put the explosives in the car. Zuev and Zhukov were responsible for tracking Russian troops movements across town, and Petrov was looking after the stash of arms and ammunition.
Vera Goncharova, the lawyer for Petrov, says he had not known any of the defendants before his arrest. Maria Eismont, defending Gorlov, says most of them only met each other in detention. Any possible connection via army vets’ groups is not enough to presume an organization, says Gorlov's mother, Irina. “If there are other ATO soldiers among them, Igor knew them, but so what? This is a small town, people have heard of each other, especially if they have connections to the army.”
Wording provided by the FSB
Details of Minko's alleged terror plan were given to investigators by another Ukrainian detainee - Dmitry Golubev (not related to Andrei Golubev) from the city of Zaporizhzhie.
Golubev is being tried in a separate case with similar charges of 'international terrorism'. Golubev says he spoke to Minko on a few occasions, while being trained to use explosives. Then, according to Golubev, Minko had plans for another terror plot in the autumn of 2022, when Melitopol residents were asked to vote in a 'referendum' on joining Russia. Golubev told FSB investigators Minko had told him about an earlier, unsuccessful idea to blow an explosive-laden car back in March.
When Dmitry Golubev was asked about the “Melitopol Five” he suggested that the court could simply use the witness statement from his investigation materials. But Igor Gorlov’s lawyer, Maria Eismont, insisted on questioning him again.
Dmitry Golubev told her the description of the would-be March terror attack 'wasn't concrete at all’ but recalled an FSB investigator telling him that 'a car would be driven to a humanitarian aid point.' Gorlov's lawyer asked if the exact wording was suggested by the FSB investigator. It was, Golubev agreed.
Four of the accused say they do not accept the charges. Andrei Golubev added that he didn't plan to use any explosives and he wasn't a member of a terror group. Igor Gorlov did not deny keeping arms and ammunition but insists that he had no plans for a terror crime, especially involving civilians.
His defence says that his intentions as an active serviceman were directed only against military targets, as he thought of resisting the armed invasion in Melitopol. The investigation, Maria Eismont points, did not produce any evidence of preparation for the plot such as messages, video or photographic exchanges. “His 'confession', recorded by Russians during so called 'voluntary cooperation' was given under torture,” says Eismont.
Lawyers for most of the accused say their clients were pressured or tortured in the run-up for the trial.
They expect the trial to last for months. At the start of the hearings Igor Gorlov and Andrei Golubev asked to be treated as prisoners of war - the former as an active serviceman, the latter as a territorial defence member. This, in theory, could aid their exchange for Russian POWs. The outcome of this request will not be known until the end of the trial.
In the meantime, right before the hearings started the cells, where the Ukrainians are being held, were raided by the prison wardens, who confiscated all the notes the Melitopol men were keeping. Their lawyers say most of the correspondence they send to their clients is not reaching them, despite being marked as 'received'.
Read this story in full in Russian here.
