This article was originally published by Coda’s editorial partner EurasiaNet.

Last summer, Crimean Tatar political activist Ilmi Umerov was receiving treatment for high blood pressure in a Simferopol hospital when FSB officers showed up one day and hauled him off to a psychiatric facility for an evaluation.

Umerov, a former deputy chairman of the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar representative body, had been a vocal critic of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In May 2016, the FSB charged him with criminal separatism after he declared, in Tatar: “We must force Russia to withdraw from Crimea.”

At the psychiatric facility, a doctor quickly let him know that he would be punished, not treated. “You just need to admit that you’re wrong, and everybody will stop bothering you,” Umerov, in an interview with Euromaidan Press, quoted the doctor as saying. “Simple as that.”