Victor Shur

He lived in the Bryansk region, but in recent years, after he was widowed, he settled in Chernihiv to help his elderly father. At the time of his arrest, he was a Russian citizen with a residence permit in Ukraine. Shur's father is a well-known collector of icon painting. Shur himself is a jeweller-entrepreneur, who studied to be a diamond cutter. On 9 December 2014, Shur was detained at the Novye Yurkovichi multilateral road checkpoint in Bryansk region, accused of hitting a police officer. He was arrested for 15 days. However, he was then charged with treason. Relatives claim that he was tortured, after which he refused a lawyer under the agreement and signed a confession. In addition, according to the relatives, Shur was promised that if he confessed guilt, he would be given a small sentence. According to the investigation, Shur was commissioned by the Ukrainian Border Guard Service to "collect information constituting a state secret", namely to take several photographs of a military airfield abandoned in the 1980s. On 7 October 2015, Viktor Shur was sentenced to 12 years in a strict regime colony