![]() Justice for conflict-related abuses and crimes committed during the 2014 Maidan protests, which led to the ouster of the Ukrainian government and mass disturbances in Odesa, remained elusive. Rule of Law, Accountability for Past Abuses At time of writing, no one was found responsible for Mastikasheva’s ill-treatment. In August, SBU officials in the Dnipropetrovsk region unlawfully detained and tortured Daria Mastikasheva, later charging her with treason for allegedly working as a Russian agent. The military prosecutor’s probe into these practices yielded no meaningful results. However, the SBU’s leadership continued to deny its responsibility for secret detentions and enforced disappearances. In June, security officials in Donetsk arbitrarily detained and forcibly disappeared a pro-Ukrainian blogger and a regular contributor to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Stanyslav Aseev, who was still in custody at time of writing.īy the end of 2016, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) released all detainees it had been unlawfully holding, in secret, in its Kharkiv branch. The circumstances of Kozlovsky’s arrest, his prolonged incommunicado detention, and the use of clearly fabricated evidence indicate political motivation. ![]() In May, a military tribunal in Donetsk convicted Igor Kozlovsky, a local academic with pro-Ukrainian views, on trumped-up charges of illegal weapons possession and sentenced him to 32 months in prison. In February, security officials in Donetsk forcibly disappeared and held incommunicado two Russian activists, releasing them two weeks later without explanation. The overall absence of the rule of law in separatist-controlled areas leaves detainees extremely vulnerable to abuse. Local security services operated without checks and balances. In the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) Russia-backed de facto authorities continued to carry out arbitrary detentions and enforced disappearances, holding civilians for weeks without any contact with lawyers, families, or the outside world. But lack of adequate sanitary and other infrastructure at crossing points, especially from the nongovernment-controlled side, exposure to landmines and shelling, and long waits in extreme temperatures continued to cause civilians undue hardship.Ĭruel and Degrading Treatment and Arbitrary Detention Ukrainian authorities took several positive steps to facilitate civilians’ crossing of the contact line. In April, a paramedic with the OSCE’s SMM was killed when the car he was riding in blew up on a landmine in eastern Ukraine. According to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Special Monitoring Mission (SMM), as of mid-November, at least 425 civilians were injured or killed in 2017, more than the previous year. In late January and early February, all sides to the conflict engaged in massive shelling of populated areas, severely damaging essential civilian infrastructure and killing civilians. The armed conflict in eastern Ukraine between the Ukrainian government and separatist armed groups supported by Russia entered its fourth year. In Crimea, Russian authorities persecuted pro-Ukraine activists and the Crimean Tatar community for their peaceful opposition to Russia’s occupation of the peninsula. New government measures further contracted media pluralism, new regulations curbed freedom of expression and association, and new draft laws propose further restrictions. The government failed to hold perpetrators of attacks on journalists to account. ![]() Total impunity for conflict-related torture and arbitrary, unacknowledged detention persisted on both sides. Throughout 2017, all sides in the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine frequently ignored the 2015 Minsk Agreements and endangered civilians and civilian infrastructure as they continued hostilities.
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