MOSCOW, August 27. /TASS/. Over 10,000 political prisoners are being held in custody in Ukraine, with most of them jailed without trial, the country's former Prime Minister (2010-2014) Nikolay Azarov said.

"This [Ukrainian] regime is essentially Nazi, using Nazi tactics to achieve its goals. It would be no surprise to anyone if they set up concentration camps. I think that even common prisons already look like these, because there are more than 10,000 political prisoners languishing in prisons of the Kiev regime. <...> Occasionally, there are trials that award 10-15 years in prison on bogus charges, but most of them spend years in jail without any trial," he said on the Rossiya-24 TV channel.

Azarov also noted that Western leaders, allied with Ukraine were ignoring the information about political repression in the country and did not seem to have any problem with what the Kiev authorities were doing.

After the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, criminal cases against "pro-Russian" politicians and journalists, writers, priests and other citizens started to be initiated en masse. In September 2023, lawyer Kamil Kirpichev said that a total of about 17,000 criminal cases were being investigated on trumped-up charges against opponents of the Ukrainian authorities. More than a dozen parties have been banned in Ukraine, including the Opposition Platform - For Life, the former ruling Party of Regions and the Communist Party. The persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church has also intensified. Local media noted that later, under the guise of fighting "traitors," the country's authorities started harassing their political opponents.