"The whole world is mobilized in order to achieve the liberation of Oleg Sentsov. Everyone hoped for a gesture, if not justice, then mercy on the part of Putin. But, on the contrary, a man from the KGB remained insensitive to a variety of petitions. More than a hundred cultural and art figures begged him to pardon their colleague Oleg Sentsov. Among the signers, you can find the French director Jean-Luc Godard, British director Ken Loach, Canadian David Cronenberg and the French minister of culture Francoise Nissen. We naively believed that such a big celebration of the brotherhood, like the World Cup in Russia, would be crowned with an amnesty of political prisoners. We were wrong. The liberation of Oleg Sentsov could justify the ease of communication that Emmanuel Macron and Putin allowed themselves, publicly turning to him for "you". But no! The Kremlin remained cold. It's not so easy to move the executioners, "writes journalist Pierre Haffner in his blog in the French edition of Mediapart..
On August 14, journalist Zoya Svetova received permission to meet with Oleg Sentsov in the Polar Bear colony in the north of Siberia. The conversation lasted two hours. Svetov was accompanied by three members of the colony, one of whom was a colonel. The journalist found Sentsov very weak. Through his lawyer, we know that since August 8, he no longer rises, the author of the article.
"Putin should remember the fate of dissident Anatoly Marchenko and the fate of the Soviet regime, which kept him in the Gulag. On August 4, 1986, Marchenko started a hunger strike, demanding the release of all political prisoners in the USSR. He starved for 117 days and died of exhaustion a few days after his release. Soon after, the Soviet Union disappeared.
The condemnation of Oleg Sentsov is just as flagrant violation of the basic rights and norms of justice that occurred with Soviet dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and many others, "recalls Haffner.
"Indulgence raises those who show it. Cruelty condemns executioners and their regime. Putin said that he considers the disintegration of the Soviet Union a catastrophe. The USSR was sentenced by its Gulag. He should learn from his past, so as not to experience it again! "- writes the journalist.