EU calls on Russia to immediately release Roman Sushchenko

"Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation upheld the verdict in the case of Roman Sushchenko, a correspondent of the Ukrainian National News Agency ‘Ukrinform’, with a sentence to 12 years in a maximum security penal colony on charges of espionage. We, as the European Union, have underscored our expectations that the Russian Federation would immediately release all the Ukrainian citizens who were illegally detained on the territory of the Crimean peninsula and in Russia," a representative of the European Union said in a commentary to an Ukrinform correspondent.

As the EU speaker noted, the name of Roman Sushchenko is indicated along with other Ukrainian prisoners held by the Kremlin in the joint statement of the EU-Ukraine Summit held in Brussels in July.

The European Union stresses that the International Federation of Journalists, the European Federation of Journalists, the OSCE representative and other representatives of the international community made the statements on condemnation of the sentence to Sushchenko and called for his release.

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