Switch Language

A criminal case has been opened against Vissarion Aseev, an Ossetian former deputy and human rights defender who left Russia, on charges of inciting terrorism online (Article 205.2 Part 2 of the Criminal Code). This was reported by ASTRA, without specifying the source of their information.

The case was triggered by an Aseev Facebook post from 16 March 2022. In the post, he shared someone else’s publication with alleged Russian army losses and wrote: “Why the hell are Ossetians going to die in Ukraine? Stay home! If you want to kill, kill Putin!”

This statement was sent for expert analysis, which concluded that it constituted a call to “an attempt on the life of a state figure with the aim of ending their activity.”

In 2023, Aseev was fined 45,000 rubles (about US$550) under the protocol for “discrediting the army” (Article 20.3.3 of the Code of Administrative Offences) for a comment stating: “Crimea is Ukraine, and it will be liberated from the Russian-fascist occupiers.”

  • Vissarion Aseev was a deputy in the Assembly of Representatives of Pravoberezhny District, North Ossetia, in the 2000s. In 2004, during the Beslan school hostage crisis, he was injured while checking the roofs of neighbouring houses with security forces. After the terrorist attack, he became a coordinator for a teachers’ committee collecting money for affected families and challenging official statements about the number of hostages.
  • In 2005, Aseev joined relatives of the Beslan victims in blocking the Baku-Rostov highway, demanding an international investigation and the resignation of the head of the republic. That same year, he organised a rally in Vladikavkaz, a major city in the North Caucasus, against the abolition of regional leader elections. Aseev also organised other protests against the authorities.
  • Aseev has said that he lived for some time in South Ossetia and, after the 2008 war, provided humanitarian aid there and collected evidence of torture and war crimes. In 2014, he married Ukrainian citizen and human rights defender Olga Skrypnyk. The couple lived in Yalta from 2011, but moved to Kyiv three years later after the occupation of Crimea. They set up the Crimean Human Rights Group, which has monitored human rights violations on the peninsula.