The captains of two Russian cargo ships have been served with notifications of suspicion of violating the procedure for entering and leaving the temporarily occupied Crimean peninsula during the transportation of Ukrainian grain looted by Russian occupiers (Section 2 of Article 332-1 of the Ukrainian Penal Criminal Code).
The Office of the Prosecutor General announced this in a statement, the CFTS portal reports.
According to investigators, the captains of the Russian-flagged Matros Pozynich and Mikhail Nenashev cargo ships are engaging in systematic illegal activities and leaving the closed Sevastopol seaport.
They are suspected of facilitating the loading of their ships with grain that Russian representatives seized illegally in the occupied Ukrainian territories and transporting the grain to third countries.
"Aware of the illegality of their actions, the captains of the ships periodically turned off their ships’ Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) and entered fictitious information about the routes of the ships into the systems to indicate that they are traveling to Russian ports and not the closed seaports in the temporarily occupied Crimea," the statement said.
The Crimean and Sevastopol division of the State Security Service of Ukraine is conducting the pre-trial investigation under the procedural guidance of the Prosecutor's Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol.
