Verkhovna Rada's Commissioner for Human Rights Lyudmyla Denysova said that the fact that Captain Viktor Novitsky of the Ukrainian fishing vessel YaMK-0041 and two Ukrainian fishermen Ruslan Kondratiuk and Andriy Morozov have been released from a pretrial detention center in the Russia-occupied Crimea is evidence of their use by the Russian Federation in its foreign policy games.

"I would like to say that such actions by the Russian Federation have nothing to do with the real human rights advocacy, and are mere evidence of its use of the Ukrainian citizens in its foreign policy game. Because first Russia violated all the international human rights norms and illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula, and then it started to use the water resources of Ukraine illegally and began to hold back Ukrainian ships. And this exhibition release of the Ukrainian sailors by the Russian authorities is no sincere humanitarian mission at all," she said in a post on Facebook.

She recalled that Novitsky, Kondratiuk, and Morozov were set free from the detention center in Simferopol because a decision had been taken to change their pretrial restriction to the recognizance not to leave. "We are doing all that is possible to protect the Ukrainian sailors' rights and we trust that they will be able to return home soon," Denysova said.

As was reported earlier, there is a criminal investigation against Novitsky in Crimea for the illegal recovery of bioresources (Part 3 of Article 256 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.) He was detained together with his crew near the shores of Crimea in May and was being held in the pretrial detention center in Simferopol.

Also, two more Ukrainians, Kondratiuk and Morozov, were detained by the Russian border guards last September when they moored to a dock in Crimea.