Abducted Crimean Tatar father sentenced to 13 years for 'anti-Russian posts' and opposing Russia’s war against Ukraine

A year and a half after Ismail Shemshedinov was seized by armed FSB officers and then disappeared, a Russian occupation ‘‘court’ has sentenced him to 13 years maximum-security imprisonment on surreal ‘treason’ charges.  The now 29-year-old Crimean Tatar, who had only recently become a father, was held incommunicado, with the FSB constantly denying any knowledge of his whereabouts. Such behaviour is typical of an enforced disappearance, not of an arrest on clearly articulated charges.

The sentence passed by the occupation ‘Crimean high court’ on 22 July 2025 was reported by both the occupation ‘prosecutor’ and by the notorious collaborator Aleksandr Talipov’s Crimean SMERSH Telegram channel. The latter made it quite clear that Shemshedinov had been targeted for supporting Ukraine and opposing Russia’s occupation of Crimea. Shemshedinov was claimed to have “spoken out against Russia on social media and written anti-Russian commentaries”.  Although the Crimean SMERSH post repeats the prosecution line that Shemshedinov had gathered and passed on information about Russian military, etc. for Ukraine’s Military Intelligence, it is clear that the FSB only ‘found’ (or concocted) evidence of this after first staging an armed search lasting over three hours and abducting the young man.  The Russian FSB is notorious for holding people incommunicado while they come up with, and fabricate ‘evidence’ for, charges.  Such ‘evidence’ typically consists primarily of ‘confessions’ extracted through torture.

It was claimed that in 2022, Shemshedinov, who opposed what Russia continues to misleadingly call its ‘special military operation’, had established contact with a representative of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence.  Purportedly on instructions from the latter, he was supposed to have gathered information geolocating oil bases; the local places of deployment of Russia’s Rosgvardia in Kherch, as well as sites of Russia’s defence ministry.  All of this, he was alleged to have passed by Messenger to  Ukraine’s Military Intelligence.

There was a further claim that Shemshedinov was a supporter of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people which is banned in Russia and on Ukrainian territory currently under Russian occupation.  Russia’s banning of the Mejlis, or representative assembly of Ukraine’s main indigenous people, elicited international condemnation  in 2016.   Instead of heeding the demands to withdraw the ban, Russia has on several occasions fabricated prosecutions in which it tried to implicate the Mejlis.  

As reported, Shemshedinov  is a nurse by profession, but had been working from home, as a masseur.  He and his wife’s infant daughter was just three months old when around 20 armed and masked FSB officers burst into the family home near Kerch on 26 January 2024.  They forced the young man to the ground and then dragged him outside although this was winter, and he was dressed in house clothes. .  His mother, Elzara Abibulyaeva explained to Crimean Solidarity that all attempts by his family to find out where Ismail was had been fruitless.  Although the FSB had told the family that they were taking him away for just three days, they later consistently denied any knowledge of his whereabouts.   It was only in April 2025 that the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre was able to ascertain, from their own sources, that Shemshedinov was held prisoner in SIZO No. 2, an FSB-controlled remand prison opened soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and largely used for political prisoners and civilians abducted from occupied territory.  The family had gone around all such Russian-controlled SIZO yet were constantly told that he wasn’t there.

Russia’s illegal use of ‘treason’ charges, under Article 275 of Russia’s criminal code meant that even the so-called ‘trial’, which may well have ended after one or two ‘hearings’, was held behind closed doors.  It is more than probable that only Russia had anything to hide, in particular its illegal abduction and the methods used to torture out a ‘confession’ and to keep the young man in total isolation until this fake ‘trial’.