Rostov court sentences Crimean resident to long term in sabotage case

Alina Grek received 15 years in prison after a trial in a military court in Rostov-on-Don for preparing to set fire to a relay cabinet.

As "Kavkazsky Uzel" reported, on August 5, the Court of Appeal upheld the sentence of Eduard Gladkikh, a resident of Krasnodar Krai, who was sentenced to 16 years for arson on the railway and an attempt to blow up a gas station in Krasnodar.

The Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don found Alina Grek, a resident of Crimea, guilty of preparing a terrorist attack on the railway in the Simferopol region of the republic, the court's press service reported. "The court sentenced Alina Grek to 15 years in a general regime penal colony," RIA Novosti quotes her as saying.

Grek was found guilty under Article 275 (treason), Article 205.3 (undergoing training for the purpose of carrying out terrorist activities), Part 1 of Article 30, Part 1 of Article 205 (attempted terrorist act) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

In September 2023, the woman established contact with an employee of the Ukrainian special services and agreed to work with them for a fee. She was given the task of purchasing components and making incendiary devices, and then using them to set fire to a railway relay cabinet on a section of the railway in the Simferopol district of Crimea. For training, she set fire to one of the devices she made, threw it on the ground and sent a video recording of her actions to her supervisor, and after a positive assessment, she was given the task of making another incendiary device to set fire to the relay cabinet. On January 22, 2024, she was detained, Interfax reported details of the charges, citing a source in law enforcement agencies.

Kavkazsky Uzel" also wrote that 19-year-old Krasnodar resident Ilya Mironichev, detained in May 2023 while setting fire to a relay cabinet on the railway, was sentenced to eleven and a half years in prison. The versions of the motives for setting fire to relay cabinets in Kuban look unconvincing, and such cases often have signs of falsification, human rights activists noted, commenting on Mironichev's sentence. The relay cabinet is an important part of the infrastructure, so the motive of sabotage is not excluded, the former employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs objected.