MOSCOW, July 11. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia urged the United States to stop its inhumane attitude to Russian citizen Konstantin Yaroshenko convicted for drug trafficking in the USA and make a medical examination on him involving Russian specialists.

“We appeal insistently to Washington to stop inhumane attitude to Konstantin Yaroshenko who suffers from several diseases and give qualified medical aid to him,” Russian Foreign Ministry’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy and Supremacy of Law Konstantin Dolgov said on Friday, noting that “We do not give up our demand to give an opportunity to make a medical examination on him involving Russian specialists.”

The Yaroshenko affair is the first abduction of Russian citizens by US security services. It occurred on May 28, 2010 in Liberia, where agents of the US Federal Drug Agency had detained and brought secretly to the United States a pilot accused of drug trafficking. US court sentenced him to 20 years in prison. Russian Embassy in Washington stated in a diplomatic note to the US State Department that the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and the 1999 bilateral consular agreement had been violated. Then the Russian Justice Ministry has sent an extradition request for Yaroshenko to the United States on the basis of the 1983 Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced People, but this request was denied.

 

Meanwhile, now the US State Department seeks to present detention of Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko in Russia “as a blatant violation of international standards and human rights.”

The second abduction case by American security services similar to that with Konstantin Yaroshenko took place on July 5, when Russian citizen Roman Seleznyov was detained at an airport in the capital of the Republic of Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean-Arabian Sea area and was brought to the island of Guam, a US territory in the Pacific, on hacking charge.

Other four Russian citizens suspected of violations of US legislation were extradited to the US, namely Viktor Bout who was convicted for weapons smuggling was extradited from Thailand; Dmitry Smilyanets suspected of cyber crimes but acquitted in court was extradited from the Netherlands; Dmitry Ustinov on accusation of smuggling military outfits - from Lithuania and Maxim Chukharev suspected of unlicensed money transfers was extradited from Costa Rica.