Legal Case of the Week

Week-ending 8 January 2021

On 7 January 2020 Valentin Vyhivsky spent his seventh Orthodox Christmas in near solitary confinement, thousands of kilometres from his family in Ukraine. Human Rights in Ukraine reports that  Vyhivsky left Ukraine for Crimea on 18 September 2013. He was detained and initially charged with ‘illegally receiving and divulging commercial, tax or banking secrets’ (Article 183 of Russia’s criminal code).  He was subsequently charged with trying to gather Russian state secrets to pass on to the Ukrainian Security Service. The FSB first reported that Vyhivsky had been sentenced to 11 years in a maximum security prison on 15 December 2015.  He was alleged to have “recruited employees of the aviation and space part of the Russian military industry to gather secret technical documentation on leading promising designs and pass them to him for financial remuneration.”  

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Human Rights in Ukraine, 7 January 2021: Valentin Vyhivsky was just 29, with a 5-year-old son, when he became one of the other victims of Russia’s undeclared war against Ukraine  – those it seized, tortured and imprisoned on fabricated charges.  He remains imprisoned in Russia, having now spent longer in Russian captivity than his grandfather, a victim of Soviet repression. On 7 January 2020, he will be spending his seventh Orthodox Christmas in near solitary confinement, thousands of kilometres from his family in Ukraine.