Andrei Serezhenko

A resident of Kherson, he was detained on 29 June 2022. According to his relatives, he was held at "Steklotara," one of the most notorious unofficial sites for torture and detention in occupied Kherson, located on the premises of a former glass-container collection and storage facility. On 2 September 2022, his relatives were informed that Serezhenko had been removed from the site. Official Russian state media reported that he was involved in organising the car bombing targeting Yevgeny Sobolev, then head of the Kherson region’s Department of the Federal Penitentiary Service. A criminal case was initiated against Serezhenko for committing a terrorist act and possession of explosives. He was not granted the formal status of a suspect until February 2024; prior to this, he was held in an undisclosed location where he was repeatedly interrogated in the presence of journalists from state-controlled media outlets (the court subsequently credited the period from 6 July 2022 to the date the sentence entered into legal force toward his prison term). Another defendant in the same case, Oleg Pronko, died in custody under unclear circumstances. On 6 August 2024, the court returned Serezhenko’s case for further investigation. The charge was reclassified from "committing a terrorist act" to "committing an act of international terrorism," apparently due to the fact that, as of June 2022, Kherson was not yet considered part of the Russian Federation's territory. During the retrial, the court reclassified the charge from "committing an act of international terrorism" to "aiding and abetting such an act." On 13 May 2025, Serezhenko was sentenced to 17 years in a strict-regime penal colony. As of March 2026, he is being held in a pre-trial detention centre in Chechnya.