18 Years in Prison for Being Tortured by the FSB

OVD Info
December 26, 2019

The state prosecutor has asked the Volga District Military Court to
sentence the five defendants in the Penza portion of the Network Case to
between six and eighteen years in prison, according to a member of the
campaign to support the defendants who was present in the courtroom.

The prosecution asked the court to hand down the longest sentence to
Dmitry Pchelintsev: 18 years in a maximum-security penal colony. It
asked the court to sentence Ilya Shakursky to 16 years, Andrei Chernov
to 14 years, Maxim Ivankin to 13 years, Mikhail Kulkov to 10, Vasily
Kuksov to 9 years, and Arman Sagynbayev to 6 years. It asked that all
the defendants except Kuksok and Sagynbayev be sent to maximum-security
penal colonies.

The prosecutor told the court that the defendants’ accounts that they
were tortured into testifying had not been corroborated.

All the defendants are accused of involvement in a “terrorist
community,” punishable under Article 205.4.4 of the Russian Criminal
Code. Pchelinsky and Shakursky are accused of organizing a “terrorist
community,” punishable under Article 205.4. In addition, some of the
defendants are accused of illegal possession of firearms (Article
222.1), illegal possession of explosives (Article 222.1.1), attempted
arson or bombing with mischievous intent (Article 167.2 in combination
with Article 30.3), and large-scale attempted drug trafficking (Article
228.1.4.g in combination with Article 30.3).

The criminal case against the Network “terrorist community” was launched
in October 2017. According to the FSB, eleven young men in Penza and
Petersburg organized the Network and were planning to overthrow the
government. The defendants in the case claimed the FSB subjected them to
psychological pressure, tortured them with electric shocks, beat them,
and planted weapons on them. Some of the defendants recanted the
confessions they made in the days following their arrests. OVD Info has
reported on each of the defendants in the case in detail.

Translated by the Russian Reader

https://therussianreader.com/2019/12/27/network-penza/