Imprisoned director acclaimed in the EUROPEAN union
his Cousin Natalia Kaplan and the lawyer Dmitry Dinze was in place when the Russia-imprisoned Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov was honored with the EUROPEAN parliament’s Sakharov prize for freedom of thought on Thursday.
– Sentsov receive this prize for their peaceful resistance. We want to show our solidarity with Oleg and all the other Ukrainian prisoners and reiterate our demand that he should be released, said president Antonio Tajani at the ceremony.
The 42-year-old Sentsov will from Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula, and strongly opposed the Russian takeover in the spring of 2014.
In may of the same year he was arrested and accused by Russian authorities of plotting terrorist offences. Despite international protests, he was sentenced the following year to 20 years in prison, which he is serving in a remote penal settlement at the Northern arctic ocean.