Ukrainian Man Pleads Not Guilty At Russian Trial, Disputes Terror Charge
A 20-year-old Ukrainian man has pleaded not guilty to a charge of abetting terrorism as his trial got under way in Russia on July 23.
"I fully disagree with the charge because critical mistakes have been made during the investigation," Pavlo Hryb said at the North Caucasus Regional Military Court in Rostov-on-Don.
Hryb went missing in August 2017 after he traveled to Belarus to meet a woman he met online.
Relatives believe he walked into a trap set by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), which later told Ukraine that Hryb was being held in a detention center in Russia on suspicion of abetting terrorism.
Russian investigators accuse Hryb of using the Internet to instruct a teenage girl in Russia's southern city of Sochi to carry out a terrorist act using an explosive device.
Hryb's father, Ihor Hryb, has argued that the case against his son was Russian retaliation for Internet posts that were openly critical of Russia's interference in Ukraine.
Russia seized control of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, after sending in troops and staging a referendum dismissed as illegal by at least 100 countries. Moscow backs separatists in a war against government forces that has killed more than 10,300 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has condemned what it called Russia's "persecution of Ukrainian citizens in Russia and elsewhere, groundless detentions of Ukrainians, violation of their rights to have fair trials, and their convictions on fabricated and politically motivated charges."
Based on reporting by TASS and RIA Novosti
That concludes our live-blogging of the Ukraine crisis for Sunday, July 22, 2018. Check back here tomorrow for more of our continuing coverage.