Ukrainian businessman Alexander Marchenko was tortured by rebels in Donbass and jailed for ten years in Russia for an old Italian sports car.
The weekends in particular are painful, says Ekaterina. On weekdays, as an employee of the tax police, she has a lot of work and people around her. But at the weekend everyone else is with their families or partners. “Then I feel how I miss Alexander.”
Alexander wrote in a letter from Russian custody about other pains: “They chained me to the top of a railing with my left hand. I hung in this position for a day and a night. Without food and water. “
War kills, divides people, tortures them. Even if it is half covered up, like the war that Russia instigated in Donbass in 2014. He also rages against people who actually want to stay out of it.
Like Alexander Marchenko. The Ukrainian businessman was caught and tortured, then imprisoned in Russia for ten years for an old Italian sports car.
Alexander, born in 1971, a medium-sized mining machinery dealer, dreamed a non-warlike dream called Lamborghini. Marchenko was not a millionaire, he and Ekaterina lived in Kiev in a rented apartment. But he had already fallen in love as a child when he saw the first “Lambo” on a collector’s picture in the packaging of an imported chewing gum.
In 2009 he bought a real Lamborghini Diablo, born in 1991, the fastest production vehicle in the world at the time. However, an accident car with a mended front body, full of foreign spare parts.
Alexander wanted to restore the car to its original condition and took it to Donetsk, to the nearest workshop that restored such vehicles. Individual parts were rare and expensive, and the work dragged on for years.
In 2014, however, pro-Russian separatists took Donetsk under their control. Armed people hijacked car showrooms and drove the Lamborghini away. Alexander and his dream had gotten on different sides of the front.
In 2017 he saw his now black “Lambo” again, on a video about a dragster race by the separatists in Donetsk. Among other things, he recognized the car by the leather seat that he had covered himself. And from acquaintances he learned that Alexander Timofejew, field commander tax minister of the separatists, had appropriated the vehicle.
In 2018, however, Timofejew was injured in a bomb attack, then disempowered and accused of being a thief, and fled to Russia. And in December Marchenko heard from Donetsk that the separatists wanted to return their property to all those robbed by Timofeev. If Alexander reports the theft by the end of the year and the papers are in order, he will get the “Lambo” back soon.
Marchenko hurried, flew with Ukrainian license plates via Moscow to Rostov-on-Don, drove on to Donetsk, there applied for the clearance of his Lamborghini. The next day he wanted to travel home via Rostov, an acquaintance was supposed to drive the car to the Ukraine later. But at the border crossing to Russia, masked people were waiting for Alexander. “They put a sack over my head and loaded me into a minibus,” he wrote later.
He ended up in Donetsk again, in the “Isolation”, a former culture factory, the separatists had turned it into a prison. “Do you work for foreign secret services?” He said no, was beaten up.
The interrogations soon concentrated on arms smuggling; he was shown videos of a foreign Russian who incriminated him seriously. He still objected, was stripped of his clothes, the henchmen wound wires around his toes and genitals, poured water on them and ran electricity through them.
In the end, he had to recite various versions of confessions in front of the camera, and they mockingly promised him an Oscar. The tortures stopped. But the soundproofing in the building was poor, he could hear the daily screams of young women being raped.
After two months he was handed over to the Russian State Security Service (FSB) at the border. With a sack over his head, he landed in Krasnodar in southern Russia, where the officials ignored his complaints about kidnapping and torture, and interrogated him again for arms smuggling. “In the FSB office where I was interrogated, one of the men turned up who had tortured me in Donetsk. He said I should sign whatever statements they wanted, otherwise he would put me back in “isolation”. At the end of April 2019, the FSB opened criminal proceedings against Marchenko for attempted arms smuggling, but on November 26 he was sentenced as a spy to ten years of more stringent imprisonment.
According to the indictment, Marchenko tried in the summer of 2018 to buy two electron tubes to amplify high-frequency signals for Soviet S-300 anti-aircraft missiles in Russia and to transport them to Ukraine. The deal failed because the Russian seller withdrew.
Marchenko’s defense attorney Yevgeny Smirnov from the Petersburg law firm Komanda 29 said the verdict was based on witnesses Marchenko never spoke to. And in response to an expert opinion, the old electron tubes, which were also in the Ukrainian army, declared a state secret, the alleged plan to buy them, but for espionage.
“The prosecutors and judges want to put a person in jail for ten years for a thought they submit to him.” Smirnov says that since 2014 a large number of people in Russia have been convicted of espionage for Ukraine. “Espionage has a lot more prestige in judicial circles than smuggling weapon parts,” explains Smirnov. “In return, there are high bonuses and fast promotions.” This is probably one of the reasons why the rebels in Donbass are eagerly supplying confessing “Ukrainian spies” to the Russian authorities.
The Moscow human rights group Memorial has declared Marchenko a political prisoner. And attorney Smirnov hopes that Russia’s last appellate court, the Supreme Court, where Komanda 29 has repeatedly won the case, will overturn the verdict or significantly mitigate it. Perhaps Alexander will also be released in a prisoner exchange with Ukraine.
Ekaterina says her husband is suffering from cardiac arrhythmias after the torture. Above all, however, he said he lacked pills in prison that were vital for him after surgery for larynx cancer. “He will be punished with detention for lying on the bed from weakness.”
But Ekaterina believes in her husband, who called her a couple of times from Russia last year. “His will is unbroken. He even comforted me on the phone. ”Ekaterina is fighting, writing petitions, demonstrating like the wives of other victims in front of Kiev ministries to get Alexander on the relevant lists of prisoners to be exchanged. But not all authorities wanted to help her husband. “Anyone who drives such a car can also pay their own legal fees,” said an official. “Alexander’s Lamborghini is still in the Donbass and remains demonized.
