17,000 inmates were serving sentences in the east before the conflict began. Many remain in jail, with no one to review their cases or authorise their release. Anton Naumlyuk travelled from Artyomovsk to Mariupol to speak to them“When [former president Viktor] Yanukovich was in power, they rammed the prisons to bursting point,” said an inmate at Penal Colony Number 57 in the village of Michurino in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. “If you nicked a bag of potatoes they’d put you away for five or seven years.” After the pro-European Maidan revolution and the fall of Yanukovich’s government, prisoners had …read more
Source: The Guardian
