In 2003, Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated a campaign to expropriate Yukos and to harass and punish its executives.
During testimony before an international tribunal in a case challenging Russia's campaign against Yukos, in which the tribunal found the company indeed had been unlawfully expropriated, a former advisor to President Putin testified that the campaign included formation in February 2003 of “a special unit [that] was set up to fabricate evidence” and to “launch the Government attack [against Yukos] under the guise of ‘legitimate’ court proceedings".
Many view Pichugin as a pawn in efforts to silence or punish Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin or other politically active Yukos leaders.
[7][8] During his first year in captivity, Pichugin described being drugged and interrogated without counsel while being pressed to give testimony against Yukos's leadership.
But Russia ignored that judgment and continues to hold Mr. Pichugin in the notorious ‘Black Dolphin’ prison....”[9] In April 2017, during free debate before the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe, the appointed rapporteur from the PACE Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights called out Pichugin’s case, describing Russia’s treatment of him as “tantamount to moral torture,” stating: “There can be no place for such inhumanity in our community of law.”[10] From his childhood Alexey Pichugin looked forward to a military career, so after leaving school in 1979 he entered the Interior Ministry's Higher Command School in Novosibirsk.
In total, he had spent 15 years protecting Soviet and Russian state interests through his membership of the military and the secret services.
Pichugin was first arrested on June 19, 2003, and accused of the attempted murders of Victor Kolesov and Olga Kostina in 1998.
There was no physical or other direct evidence presented at Pichugin's closed-court trial that implicated his involvement in any of noted crimes.
Pichugin has sought relief from the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers to have the Russian Federation abide by the ECHR judgment.
The star prosecution witness was a multiple murderer serving a life sentence - a fact the jury was not allowed to know.
For example, Alexei Peshkun, whose testimony was relied upon for Pichugin's first conviction, subsequently submitted a hand-written document stating that his statements were coerced by Russian authorities.
Another jailhouse confessor, Vladimir Shapiro, stated that investigators offered him “manna from heaven” if he falsely implicated Pichugin.
Regardless of this manufactured evidence, on July 5, 2005, the deputy prosecutor gave an interview in which he stated Pichugin (and Nevzlin's) guilt as fact.
On September 11, 2005, the lead investigator gave a similar interview, expressing his opinion that Pichugin was guilty.
Once the trial began, like in his first case, defense counsel's attempts to challenge the witnesses against Pichugin were cut off by the presiding judge.
That court ordered that, after re-trial, Pichugin should be given a harsher sentence, confirming the result of the case in advance.
The European Court further found violation of article 6 paragraph 1 of the convention, based on the secrecy of both the trial and Pichugin's domestic appeal, which were each conducted in secret without access by the public or media.