Oleg Sentsov and Aleksandr Kolchenko in court. (c) Sergei Pivovarov, VisualRIANIn the aftermath of Russia’s military occupation of Crimea in February 2014, Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov was busy. Maidan, as Sentsov stated in a Rostov military court on 6 August, had been ‘the main act of his life’. Later, after the dust began to settle, Sentsov set to work back in his hometown of Simferopol.
Helping journalists covering the fast-moving events on the ground, Sentsov assisted Ukrainian troops under blockade, driving them across Crimea to mainland Ukraine. He also searched for activists who had gone missing during the occupation. Some of them were never found.
However, it soon became clear that demonstrations and organising by local residents against the Russian occupation were not going to change the situation. Protest leaders were abducted ahead of the referendum on 16 March announced by the self-proclaimed government; a Crimean Tatar, Reshat Ametov, had been found dead the day before. Ten days prior, Ametov had held a solitary picket in the centre of Simferopol.
