The Ukrainian consuls did not have access to visit four political prisoners, citizens of Ukraine, who were all the time illegally detained in the Russian Federation: Oleh Sentsov, Oleksandr Kolchenko, Ferat Sayfullayev and Rustem Vaitov.

"At the moment, there are four political prisoners that the consuls did not have access to. During all the time, there was no access at all to Sentsov, Kolchenko, Vaitov and Sayfullaev," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry's spokeswoman Mariana Betsa said in a comment to Interfax-Ukraine.

According to her, the Russian side motivates the refusal by the fact that all illegally arrested people are Crimeans, and therefore ostensibly Russian citizens, because they acquired Russian citizenship due to the annexation of the peninsula.

As reported, In August 2015, the North Caucasian District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced Sentsov, who was detained in Crimea in 2014, to 20 years in a maximum-security penitentiary on charges of setting up a terrorist group in the peninsula. Kolchenko was sentenced to ten years in prison in the same case. At the beginning of May 2016, the convicts filled out documents to be transferred to Ukraine to serve their sentence, but in October, Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine Serhiy Petukhov said that the Russian Federation refused to hand over Sentsov and Kolchenko to serve their sentence to their homeland.

On September 7, the North Caucasus District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced Ruslan Zeytullayev to seven years' imprisonment; Ferrat Sayfullayev, Rustem Vaitov and Yury Primov were sentenced to five years' imprisonment each for participation in a unit of the Hizb ut-Tahrir organization banned in Russia. Investigators claim Zeytullayev organized a regional undercover unit of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Sevastopol, and the rest of the defendants were recruiters into the organization declared terrorist in the territory of Russia.