MOSCOW, October 3. /TASS/. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) branch in the Zhitomir Region has charged a sailor from the crew of the Ukrainian navy’s sole submarine, the Zaporozhye, in absentia for high treason after he refused to redeploy it to Ukrainian waters after Crimea's reunification with Russia in 2014.

As the regional SBU branch noted in its Telegram channel, the sailor had been "performing military service as an engineer in the radio-technical combat unit of the large submarine Zaporozhye at the Ukrainian armed forces’ naval operations center" since 2011. In 2014, he "refused to comply with an order to redeploy the Zaporozhye submarine to Ukraine-controlled territory." The agency did not disclose the sailor’s name.

"He is hereby stripped of his officer’s rank and dismissed from military service by order of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry for violating his military oath. <...> He faces up to 15 years in prison for treason," the SBU communication said.

The Zaporozhye, a Soviet-made submarine originally launched in 1970, joined the Ukrainian armed forces after the division of the old Soviet Black Sea Fleet in 1997. Even then, the submarine’s technical condition was deemed unsatisfactory. It was relaunched in 2012 following a series of repairs. After the reunification of the Crimean peninsula with Russia, the submarine remained in Crimea but was not accepted into service by the Russian Navy given its outdated, unseaworthy condition. Since then, there have been various proposals to scrap the vessel or place it in a museum, but to date the ultimate fate of the submarine has yet to be determined.