Ukrainian filmmaker Sentsov enters day 100 of hunger strike

MOSCOW: Western governments and activists on Tuesday stepped up pressure on Russia to free jailed Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov as he reached day 100 of a hunger strike.

The 42-year-old Kremlin opponent was arrested in Crimea after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of the peninsula and has been languishing in a Russian Artic prison with little hope of release. He announced the hunger strike in May, demanding the release of all Ukrainian political prisoners being held in Russia. Sentsov’s cousin Natalia Kaplan was among several dozen people demonstrating in front of the Russian embassy in Kiev Tuesday.

“Oleg is hanging in there... He is not broken,” she told protesters, some of whom were carrying signs that read “Free Sentsov” and “Stop Putin”.But in an interview with AFP last week, Kaplan painted a gloomy picture of her relative’s health and state of mind.

“He wrote to me that we mustn’t tell him any more that freedom is coming. He doesn’t believe it any more,” she said.“He has a very weak heartbeat of 40 beats per minute. He complains that his heart hurts, that he’s weak, and he tries to not get up too often to preserve his strength.”

In the Czech Republic, filmmakers said they were launching a rotating hunger strike in solidarity with the director. The French daily Le Monde carried a plea signed by dozens of figures from the world of culture calling for his release.Ukrainian foreign ministry spokeswoman Mariana Betsa also demanded that Sentsov be freed.