Seven pre-trial detention facilities across Russia, including the main detention center in occupied Simferopol, have come under the management of the Federal Security Service (FSB), according to Russia's official corporate registry. The transfer, which took effect in March 2026, reverses an arrangement that had been in place since 2005, when Moscow handed the facilities to its prison service at the Council of Europe's insistence.
The move draws immediate scrutiny in Crimea's case: registry data for the Simferopol facility—listed as the former SIZO-8 of Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service—has been restricted and is no longer publicly visible. The same opacity does not apply to the six other facilities transferred to FSB control, which are located in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Vladikavkaz, and Chelyabinsk. The Moscow facility is the notorious Lefortovo prison.
The reason for hiding the Simferopol data is not stated. Previously, the registry listed Rauf Idrisov as the facility's director. All seven sites have now been renamed "FSB SIZOs" or "FSB Territorial Departments."
A facility already past breaking point
As reported by Ukrinform, the Simferopol detention center sits at an address that also houses SIZO-2, a separate facility that human rights groups say functions as the main holding site for political prisoners in occupied Crimea. According to the Crimean Process Group, SIZO-2 holds people with pro-Ukrainian views on charges of "terrorism," "sabotage," and "espionage"—cases human rights monitors describe as fabricated.
By Russia's own figures, Crimea's detention centers are already at 103% capacity. Russian occupation authorities have said they plan to expand the number of places in the coming years.
As of 2026, at least 350 Crimean political prisoners are held across Russia and occupied Crimea, according to the Crimean Tatar Resource Center.
Who is held there—and where they end up
Since Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014, the peninsula's detention facilities have processed a steady stream of people arrested on political grounds. The majority are Crimean Tatars and ethnic Ukrainians. Charges have included membership in organizations banned only in Russia, displaying Ukrainian symbols, or simply holding pro-Ukrainian views.
A significant number of those arrested in Crimea have been transferred to prisons deep inside Russia, thousands of kilometers from their families—a practice the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers explicitly demanded be stopped in a December 2025 ruling. Human rights activists note the transfers also violate international humanitarian law and fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
Russia has compounded the isolation by automatically assigning Russian citizenship to Crimean residents after the annexation—a move its own courts have used to block international legal mechanisms for prisoner transfers back to Ukraine.
One case that illustrates the pattern is that of Emir-Usein Kuku, a Crimean Tatar human rights defender arrested in 2016 on fabricated charges under the so-called "Yalta Group of Crimean Muslims" case. Sentenced to 12 years in a maximum-security colony, he is now held in Penal Colony No. 16 in Salavat, Republic of Bashkortostan—over 2,500 kilometers from Crimea. Chronic kidney and spinal injuries sustained during his arrest have worsened in custody. He has received no adequate postoperative care following emergency surgery in 2023.
The FSB returns to a role it lost in 2005
The FSB previously controlled Russia's pre-trial detention network until 2005, when Moscow agreed to transfer the facilities to the Federal Penitentiary Service as a condition of Council of Europe membership. That reform was supposed to bring Russia's detention practices closer to European human rights standards.
The reversal of that arrangement—two decades later, and a year after Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine—closes a loop that human rights groups had long warned about. FSB-run detention carries particular significance for political prisoners: the agency conducts the interrogations, controls access to lawyers, and now also controls where suspects are held before trial.
The opacity around the Simferopol facility adds to a broader pattern of diminishing visibility into detention conditions in occupied Crimea. UN and OSCE monitors have repeatedly been denied access to the peninsula since 2014.
How to reach political prisoners
For those held in Russian facilities, even a letter from a stranger can matter. Former prisoner Vladyslav Yesypenko, a Ukrainian journalist released after being held in Crimea, has said that letters were what gave him the strength to hold on.
Human Rights House Crimea and Crimean Process have launched an AI-assisted platform that makes it possible to write letters to Crimean political prisoners through official channels that work with Russian prisons. The system generates a letter based on answers to a short questionnaire, translates it into Russian to comply with prison censorship requirements, and forwards any response to the sender. Letters can be addressed to specific prisoners—including Kuku, journalist Asan Akhtemov, and human rights activist Iryna Danylovych—or to any named prisoner not yet on the list.
