Alexey Albu: Prisoners in Ukraine rebel against inhumane treatment, Nazi bias

August 2: The expert of the Institute for Innovative Development, ex-deputy of the Odessa Regional Council, and coordinator of Union Borotba (Struggle) from Odessa Alexey Albu protested the unjust situation in Ukraine, which has developed around common prisoners and prisoners implicated in the ATO [Anti-Terrorist Operation] in the Donbass. 

Albu’s opinion was published on his Facebook page, where he commented on the latest news from Poltava, where prisoners staged a mutiny and refused to eat and work.

“If Batyu* is freed – then freedom for all!” is the slogan increasingly heard in Ukrainian prisons and colonies. Prisoners resent not only the inhumane treatment by the regime and disgusting, intolerable conditions of detention, but these protests are beginning to expose the social subtext: for a stolen chicken or a sausage a person should rot for several years in prison, while if you’re a Nazi, who robbed and killed civilians in the East of the country, who raped and mocked women during the ATO — the Prosecutor General of Ukraine comes to you and solves all your problems. Or if you’re a Nazi of lower status, then you’re released on bail for 3,000 hryvnia,” Alexey wrote.

Albu also noted that more and more prisoners resent the bias in favor of members of the “neo-Nazi gangs, whom high-ranking patrons constantly bail out,” and that this contradiction “between ordinary prisoners and the Nazis only escalates.”

*”Batyu” a.k.a. Valentine Likholetov, former chief of staff of the neo-Nazi Aydar Battalion, was charged with crimes in the conduct of the Ukrainian war against Donbass. He was released by the Kiev Court of Appeals on July 2.

Translated by Greg Butterfield