On March 10, 2023, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation announced that Ukrainian human rights defender and serviceman Maksym Butkevych, who had been captured by the Russian forces in the Luhansk region past summer, was sentenced by so-called "Supreme Court of the Luhansk People's Republic" to 13 years in prison. He was tried together with two other Ukrainian prisoners, Viktor Pokhozhey and Vladyslav Shel, who were sentenced to 8.5 and 18.5 years.
We believe that the case against Butkevych was fabricated and that his confession was forced.
Maksym Butkevych is a Ukrainian human rights defender and journalist. He is co-founder of the "Bez Kordoniv" ("No Borders") project, an organization created to support asylum seekers in Ukraine and IDPs. He is a life-long anti-racist and a committed fighter against hate speech in all forms.
He is also one of the founding members of ZMINA Human Rights Center and Hromadske public radio. As a journalist, Butkevych worked for a number of Ukrainian as well as international media outlets. He joined the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in March 2022 and was captured in June of the same year in the vicinity of Zolote and Girske villages on the territory of the Russia-occupied Luhansk region.
Until today, no information about the charges brought against Butkevych has been made public.
Butkevych was not provided with a lawyer and was not given a chance to have a fair trial. The conditions of his detention and the other circumstances of his captivity were not properly monitored by international organizations, in particular because Russia refuses to allow independent observers to visit the detention centers it creates in the Russia-occupied territories.
Almost immediately after Butkevych was taken prisoner, a number of Russian propagandist media published manifestly false and slanderous information about him: they ascribed to him statements which he had never made and views, which are opposite to the ones that he held and professed publicly. All of this is evidence that Russians were actively fabricating his case, painting Butkevych as a violent person capable of committing war crimes since the very beginning of his captivity.