UOC priest sentenced to 14 years in a strict regime colony in Russia
The clergyman was detained in Crimea back in 2023.
In the Zaporizhzhia region, Russian occupation authorities sentenced UOC priest Kostiantyn Maksimov to 14 years in a strict regime colony on charges of espionage. According to First Zaporizhzhian, this was reported by the illegal prosecutor's office of Crimea.
It is alleged that from April 2022 to February 2023, the priest, residing in Tokmak, supposedly "collected information on the coordinates of the locations of Russian air defense technical equipment located in the city and district."
The collected data was transmitted to an employee of the Security Service of Ukraine via an internet messenger.
According to the Center for Civil Liberties, on the morning of May 16, 2023, the clergyman of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Kostiantyn Maksimov, left the occupied Tokmak on a volunteer humanitarian mission through Crimea.
At 10:27, he informed his friends by phone that he had approached a checkpoint, presumably in Chonhar. Since then, there had been no contact with him. It is likely that the clergyman was taken off the bus and detained by Russian military personnel, then taken to a filtration camp in Dzhankoy.
As the UOJ reported, Priest Kurmoyarov, convicted for spreading fake news about the army, was released in Russia.
