Court hands non-suspended jail terms to Russian anglers who resisted arrest

Photo: Peeter Lilleväli / Põhjarannik

The Viru County Court on Thursday handed down non-suspended sentences to two Russian citizens who resisted arrest by Estonian border guards after illegally entering Estonian waters by boat on Narva River in September.

The court found Mihail Suhushin, 63, and Alexander Ladurov, 54, guilty of crossing the Estonian-Russian temporary control line and punished them with two months and nine days in jail in a plea bargain deal. Both men were also barred from entering Estonia for five years.

The Vasknarva border patrol station received information at about 12:20 p.m. on Sept. 20 that a fishing boat with a Russian registration number had been spotted on the river on the Estonian side of the border. The border guards who responded to the call established that two citizens of Russia had illegally crossed the de facto borderline.

The men put up strong resistance to the border guards and ignored the orders given them. Attempting to escape back to Russian territory, they cut three times the rope with which their boat was tied to the border guard boat.

The Russians were taken to the Johvi house of detention where they were charged with illegal crossing of the border with a means of transport in a place where border crossing is banned and with ignoring orders from border guards.

The circumstances of the incident and the trespassers' motives are being established, head of the border guard unit of the North prefecture of the police Indrek Puvi said in September. «The de facto borderline on Narva River is clearly visible as it is marked with special buoys with a short distance between them. Because of that, relatively few border violations out of carelessness occur on the Narva. Resistance to border guards is extremely rare,» he said.