WHEN:

20 November 2017 at 7.00PM

WHERE:

Macmillan Room, Portcullis House, Bridge Street, Westminster SW1A 2LW (MAP)

REGISTRATION:

Please feel free to invite your friends and colleagues to this event.  Anyone who would like to attend should please RSVP to secretariat@britishukrainiansociety.org at their earliest convenience.  Due to tight security and the potential for queues, we would advise you to allow at least 30 minutes to enter Portcullis House.  A map and further instructions will be sent in due course to those who RSVP.

Russia’s hybrid warfare: the plight of Ukrainian political prisoners

The British Ukrainian Society and the Embassy of Ukraine to the UK would like to invite to a discussion on 20 November at 7pm in the Macmillan Room, Portcullis House about Russia’s use of hybrid war, with an analysis of the tactics employed against Ukrainian citizens taken as political prisoners in Russia.

The esteemed panel includes:

• Robert Seely MP, Conservative Member for the Isle of Wight
• Alya Shandra, Managing Editor of Euromaidan Press and coordinator of the LetMyPeopleGo campaign
• Nadiya Volkova, lawyer at the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union.

Support Let My People Go campaign #LetMyPeopleGo

Russia’s undeclared war against Ukraine is entering its fourth year. One of its consequences, apart from >10,000 people killed, is a plethora of political prisoners. To date, at least 44 (perhaps nearly 50) Ukrainians are illegally imprisoned by Russia on political motives, and this number keeps rising. Some of them are well-known, like the filmmaker Oleg Sentsov (and now-released pilot Nadiya Savchenko), others are less so. Many were brutally tortured to extort “confessions.” All of them are instruments of Russia’s war against Ukraine. All were jailed for no reason and are victims of injustice.

Euromaidan Press has followed their fates since 2015 within the #LetMyPeopleGo human rights advocacy campaign. Now, we are launching a newsletter to further engage and connect people interested in their release.

With over 10,000 people killed, and over a million displaced as a result of Russia’s war, why should we care about a few dozen people in Russian jails, even if wrongfully imprisoned?

That is a legitimate question to ask. One reason is that these prisoners are instruments of Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine – they are victims fed into Russia’s propaganda machine which needs living “proof” of Ukraine’s supposed treacherous acts against Russia. State-controlled TV feeds churns out these stories to the Russian populace, which in its turn generates inter-ethnic hatred, fuels the Russian war against Ukraine in Donbas, and cements Putin’s ratings as a strong leader. Another is that Russia uses show trials against Crimean Tatars, the indigenous population of the Crimean peninsula who resisted its occupation by Russia in 2014, to terrorize and intimidate the people who dare stand up to those who oppose it.

Sign Up for Newsletter

Euromaidan Press has launched a weekly newsletter to raise the global awareness of the systemic human rights violations the Kremlin regime commits against the citizens of Ukraine. It aims to mobilize the efforts of activists, diplomats, opinion makers, media, and all the non-indifferent people around the world to speed up the liberation of dozens Ukrainian political prisoners held in Russia and occupied Crimea.

We ask you to sign up (the form is in the right column of this page) to receive all the major updates regarding the fates of Ukrainian hostages of the Kremlin, as well as the options of helping them and their families.

The first newsletter (12 September 2017) is available here. The next issues will be also published on website www.letmypeoplego.org.ua

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