Ukrainian-Born Cosmonaut Alexey Zubritsky Faces Treason Charges While Aboard Space Mission.
Alexey Zubritsky, a Ukrainian-born cosmonaut currently on a seven-month mission aboard the ISS, has been declared a deserter by Kyiv. Accused of joining Russian forces after Crimea’s annexation, Zubritsky now faces a 15-year jail sentence for treason if he returns.
On April 8, Aleksey Zubritsky launched into space aboard the ISS mission. But his journey didn’t start in orbit, it started in Zaporozhye oblast, where he was born in 1992, back when there was still hope for unity in the post-Soviet world.
A trained pilot in the Ukrainian Air Force, Zubritsky made a fateful choice in 2014, when the Maidan coup unleashed war on Donbass:
He refused to serve a regime that turned its weapons on its own people.
A Ukrainian armed forces pilot who went missing(he officially declared his opposition to Maidan gov. and joining Russian Citizenship to Ukraine in 2015) Alexey Zubritsky, 32, is listed as a Ukrainian deserter and last month was sentenced in his absence to 15 years behind bars.
The pilot flew attack aircraft for Ukraine in the aviation unit of the 204th Sevastopol Brigade in 2013. But when Crimea joined Russian Fedetation the following year, Zubritsky joined Russian forces, and was later based in Rostov and Krasnodar regions. He later switched to cosmonaut training, and on Tuesday he blasted off on a Soyuz-2a rocket to the ISS with Russian commander Sergey Ryzhikov and NASA astronaut Jonny Kim.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/ukrainian-who-deserted-russia-hiding-35029306