“Kommersant”: the court reduced by 6 months the term for a Belarusian convicted of kidnapping an ex-FSB officer
punishment of 40-year-old Belarusian Andrei Tseiko, convicted of kidnapping and transporting to Ukraine of former FSB officer Roman Fialkovsky in 2018. This is reported by “Kommersant” with reference to the lawyer of the defendant Alexander Meleshko.
According to him, after considering the appeal of the defense against the verdict, the judicial troika changed the qualification of the offense from robbery (Article 162 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) to robbery (Article 161 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), which is considered a less serious crime. In addition, the qualifying sign of dangerous harm to health was excluded – we are talking about the allegedly used by criminals in the abduction of the victim with an injection with an unidentified paralyzing drug, since the investigation did not conduct an examination.
As a result, Tseiko's term was reduced from 10 years of deprivation freedom up to 9.5 years. He was convicted in May by the Domodedovo Court of the Moscow Region, which found him guilty of kidnapping, robbery, extortion.
As the court established, in August 2018, Tseiko and two fellow countrymen attacked Fialkovsky's cottage at night. They pricked the Chekist with a certain drug and took away the Range Rover Sport in his own car. On the way, the kidnappers extorted 50 million rubles from the hostage and re-registered his car. Then Fialkovsky was transported to Ukraine and kept there in the basement, but then released. When returning to his homeland, the security officer was detained at the border by officers of the Security Service of Ukraine, who, during a search, seized a pen for hidden audio recording, a removable drive with classified data and a military ID with a record of service in the FSB. He was accused of smuggling spy equipment, fined and released. In Russia, Fialkovsky wrote a statement against Tseiko, who worked as a builder in St. Petersburg; they could not detain his accomplices, because they were in Ukraine.
Tseiko did not admit his guilt, telling another version of what happened. He insists that the Chekist sold his friends the car in which they were going to go to Ukraine. Fialkovsky, who was also going there on business, asked for them. On the way, the whole company was actively drinking. The Ukrainian authorities are looking for Fialkovsky, suspecting him of collecting data on the grouping of troops in Donbass.