Release date
Eight men sentenced to life in prison by a Russian judge for the attack on a bridge connecting Crimea and Russia filed a joint appeal on Tuesday seeking their release, saying they had no knowledge of the operation planned by Kiev.
The 2022 explosion killed five people and severely damaged the Kerch Bridge, which was built after Russia annexed the region from Ukraine in 2014 and has become a powerful symbol of Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s ambitions.
The bridge suffered two more major attacks in 2023 and 2025, both carried out by Ukrainian forces resisting a full-scale Russian invasion.
Men from Russia, Ukraine and Armenia appealed to President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to include them in the release of prisoners of war agreed to in talks to end the war.
They were jailed last year but have always denied the charges, describing themselves in their plea for freedom as “eight ordinary people who got up every day to earn their bread, pay their rent and hug their children.”
“But now we are ‘terrorists’. We are sentenced to life imprisonment and sentenced to a slow and humiliating death in the cement cages of Russian prisons,” they said in a letter published by the Russian memorial rights group.
Some of the men were involved in transporting construction materials, which were found to contain explosives, but they always claimed they did not know about it.
Human rights groups claimed they were carrying out their normal duties and said Kiev had used people who “knew nothing” about the operation.
The men include the head of a logistics company in St. Petersburg, a farmer and fruit trader from occupied Ukraine, and a truck driver.
“We are innocent!” exclaimed Oleg Antipov, a logistics and supply manager who spotted the drivers transporting supplies to Crimea, at the November verdict.
In 2023, the head of Ukraine’s security services at the time, Vasyl Malyuk, acknowledged that Kiev had used “very many people behind the scenes” in the attack, and said that Moscow had arrested people who were “actually engaged in normal daily work.”
Among them was Roman Solomko, a farmer from occupied Ukraine who, in the wake of Western sanctions, advised his neighbors, and possibly SBU officials, on how to get materials into Russia.
He claimed he had no knowledge of the explosives.
The other men included fruit trader Vladimir Zurob, brothers Artem and Georgy Azatyan who owned the warehouse, another trader Alexander Birin and Armenian truck driver Artur Telchanyan, who claim they were part of what they considered normal transport logistics.
Additional sources of information • AFP