Crimean Tatar, resident of the village of Azovskoye in the Kherson region of Ukraine. According to the investigation, he decided to cross the border with Russia and enter Crimea on 20 April 2022. For this purpose, he arrived at the checkpoint "Dzhankoy", and Abdurakhmanov did not have any documents with him, except for a military ticket of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He allegedly wanted to travel to Crimea for personal reasons. Since he did not have the documents required to enter the Russian Federation, a decision was made not to let him pass through and subsequently detained him. On 9 August 2022, he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment on charges of involvement in an illegal armed formation, namely the Crimean Tatar Volunteer Battalion named after Noman Chelebidzhikhan, which apparently had long been dormant at the time of the prosecution.

A few months after the verdict, in December 2022, Ruslan Abdurakhmanov handed over a letter from the pre-trial detention centre, where he described completely different circumstances of his detention. According to his version, it happened on 18 April 2022 in the village of Azovskoye, occupied by Russian troops in Genicheskiy district. Armed men in balaclavas and camouflage uniforms with patches of the flags of the DNR and Russia broke into his house.

Abdurakhmanov, according to him, was taken with a bag over his head to the building of vocational school No. 17 in Genichesk.

Abdurakhmanov described interrogations with the use of electric shocks, threats and beatings. After he signed some papers, the content of which he does not know, he was transported to the FSB building in Simferopol. Further, according to Abdurakhmanov's testimony, he was in the pre-trial detention centre also in torture conditions, practically without food and water, he was pressurised by the investigators. As a result, he denounced himself.

You can read more about politically persecuted people in the Telegram channel OVD-Info LIVE and our politically motivated criminal prosecutions in Russia database