Vesti Nedeli was able to give the only example of Ukrainian sabotage in Crimea – a dubious case of 2018

In 2018 (apparently, the correspondent found it difficult to find a more recent example) the Russian authorities really announced about the arson of the house of the Mufti of Crimea Emirali Ablaev. One of the members of the group, allegedly created specifically for this action, Kharkiv resident Alexander Steshenko, was sentenced to two years in a penal colony for deliberate destruction of property; he was dismissed from charges of participating in an extremist community. The investigation announced the organizer of the action, Erol Veliyev, assistant to the Crimean Tatar leader and deputy of the Verkhovna Rada Mustafa Dzhemilev.

The arson case looked very strange from the very beginning. The incident, according to the investigation, took place in January 2018 – the house of the mufti was showered with Molotov cocktails. But the first message about this appeared only in May, and Ablaev himself spoke about this only after the corresponding statement from the FSB.

Russian news agency “Kryminform” circulated a video showing how people who cannot be identified throw burning bottles into an outbuilding attached to a stone house; the wall of the extension lights up. Mufti Ablaev told about it like this:

“At night, at about three o’clock in the morning, there was a crash, my wife saw a flash in the window. They decided that it was the youth on the street indulging in pyrotechnics, and did not pay much attention. In the morning, leaving for work, they found traces of arson from bottles with a combustible mixture, the so-called Molotov cocktail. Fortunately, the bottles that got into the house did not ignite; those that hit the fence caught fire. The intruders fled. In the morning after the discovery of arson, we filed a complaint with the law enforcement agencies. “

It is not clear why Ablaev calls this structure a fence. And it is completely impossible to understand why he concealed this information before the FSB report.

Before that, on April 11, in Crimea detained re-arrived there Alexander Steshenko. From the Chongar checkpoint, he called his mother and said that he had been detained by Russian border guards. But formally he was arrested for “disobeying the lawful demand of police officers.” According to the official version, he was detained on April 12 at the Simferopol bus station, where he allegedly refused to show the police his passport, “behaved aggressively and waved his hands.” On this charge, he served 12 days of arrest, and at the exit from the IVS he was put into a car without license plates and taken away.

In May, the FSB circulated a video of Steshenko’s interrogation, where he claims that Erol Veliyev set the task of setting fire to the mufti’s house before him. For this, Veliyev demanded “to buy two bottles of wine in order to mix a Molotov cocktail in them.” They also demonstrated video evidence: Steshenko, in the company of another man, chooses wine in the store. It seems that the purchase of wine is the only evidence in the case, except for the testimony of Steshenko himself, which, according to his lawyer, was obtained under torture, and during the process the defendant for some reason refused independent lawyers.

It is curious that in his testimony Steshenko speaks of two bottles. In the video, the extension is set on fire with exactly two bottles. It is not clear what kind of unlit bottles that got into the wall of the house Ablaev says.

In his testimony, Steshenko states that he refused to participate in the arson and instead of him, Erol Veliyev went to Ablaev’s house. He, however, claims that at the time of the alleged arson he was not in Crimea and this can be confirmed by the Ukrainian border service, which records every crossing of the administrative border.

The audio recording of the conversation between SBU General Dotsenko, who in 2017 worked as the head of the Main Directorate of the SBU in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea temporarily located in Kherson, with his deputy Viktor Levchuk, was never published before the Vesti story. How it was obtained is not reported. It is strange that the conversation is conducted in Ukrainian, but Levchuk’s phrase “The Tatars will say: that we are our mufti, a Muslim, but never in our life!” for some reason sounds in Russian.