The European Parliament is set to award its prestigious Sakharov prize for human rights on Wednesday to jailed Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov, at a time of heightened tensions between Russia and the West.
Sentsov, a fierce critic of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, was sentenced in 2015 to two decades in a Russian prison after being convicted of conspiracy to commit terrorist attacks in Crimea.
When Sentsov was announced as the winner on October 25, European Parliament President Antonio Tajani called for his release, adding that the European Union is ‘expressing its solidarity with him and his cause.’ …read more
Source: Gulf times
