“What did you come to us for? You came to protect us? From whom? You ‘protected’ me from my husband, whom you killed.”
A 21-year-old Russian soldier was found guilty Monday of killing an unarmed civilian in Ukraine’s first war crimes trial since Russia’s invasion. He was sentenced to life in prison.
A court in Kyiv handed down the verdict after Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin pleaded guilty last week to killing a 62-year-old Ukrainian man in the northeastern Sumy province but said he was following orders.
Shishimarin pleaded guilty to killing 62-year-old Oleksandr Shelipov, who was pushing his bicycle near the village of Chupakhivka, near the Russian border, during the early days of the invasion in late February.
Shelipov “died on the spot just a few meters from his home,” according to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova.
Shishimarin’s charge, “violation of the rules and customs of war," is punishable by 10 years to life imprisonment.
Shelipov’s widow last week said she would like Shishimarin to be sentenced to life imprisonment but that she would be open to him being exchanged for Ukrainian fighters who were taken to Russian-held territory from the Azovstal plant in Mariupol.
Russian soldier asks victim’s family for forgiveness in Ukraine court
Prosecutors argued that Shishimarin, a member of Russia’s 4th Guards Kantemirovskaya tank division, committed a war crime when he fired multiple rounds from his rifle at Shelipov.
Shishimarin was represented by a Ukrainian court-appointed lawyer, who had said that the case against his client was strong. Still, it was important to preserve Shishimarin’s human rights to show him that Ukraine is “a country different to the one he is from," his attorney, Victor Ovsyanikov, told the New York Times.
Shishimarin said that he did not want to kill Shelipov and that he only shot because he was ordered to do so. Ovsyanikov said that Shishimarin had feared for his own safety if he had not shot, and that the shots he fired were aimless, Reuters reported.
“I personally think that it should not be this young man in the dock, but the senior leadership of the other country that I think is guilty of unleashing this war,” Ovsyanikov said, according to Reuters.
Throughout the invasion, Moscow has struggled to manage young, inexperienced troops who have suffered low morale and at times seemed uncommitted to the cause.
A separate trial involving two Russian soldiers charged with war crimes in the alleged shelling of civilian targets in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine is ongoing. Legal experts have told The Washington Post that Ukraine, which is party to the European Convention on Human Rights, appears to be adhering to international guidelines on prosecuting war crimes, including the right of the defendant to a fair trial by an independent court.
What rights do prisoners of war have under international law?
Shelipov’s family confronted Shishimarin last week while he sat in a glass defendant’s cell. Shelipov’s widow asked the soldier, “Please tell me, what did you feel toward my husband?” Shishimarin replied: “Yes, I admit guilt. I understand that you will not be able to forgive me. I ask for forgiveness for what was done.”
The widow, Kateryna Shelipova, invoked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unfounded justifications for the war — that Moscow was simply rescuing Ukrainians from “Nazis” — asking the soldier: “What did you come to us for? You came to protect us? From whom? You ‘protected’ me from my husband, whom you killed.”
Source: washingtonpost.com, Bryan Pietsch and Annabelle Chapman, May 23, 2022
Russian sentenced to life in Ukraine's 1st war crimes trial
Meanwhile, in a rare public expression of opposition to the war from the ranks of the Russian elite, a veteran Kremlin diplomat resigned and sent a scathing letter to foreign colleagues in which he said of the invasion, “Never have I been so ashamed of my country as on Feb. 24."
Also, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for “maximum” sanctions against Russia in a video address to world leaders and executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
And on the battlefield, heavy fighting raged in the Donbas in the east, where Moscow's forces have stepped up their bombardment. Cities not under Russian control were constantly shelled, and one Ukrainian official said Russian forces targeted civilians trying to flee.
In the first of what could be a multitude of war crimes trials held by Ukraine, Russian Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, 21, was sentenced for the killing of a 62-year-old man who was shot in the head in a village in the northeastern Sumy region in the opening days of the war.
Shishimarin, a member of a tank unit, had claimed he was following orders, and he apologized to the man's widow in court.
His Ukraine-appointed defense attorney, Victor Ovsyanikov, argued his client had been unprepared for the “violent military confrontation” and mass casualties that Russian troops encountered when they invaded. He said he would appeal.
Ukrainian civil liberties advocate Volodymyr Yavorskyy said it was “an extremely harsh sentence for one murder during the war.” But Aarif Abraham, a British-based human rights lawyer, said the trial was conducted “with what appears to be full and fair due process," including access to an attorney.
Ukrainian prosecutors are investigating thousands of potential war crimes. Russian forces in Mariupol bombed a theater where civilians were sheltering and struck a maternity hospital. In the wake of Moscow’s withdrawal from around Kyiv weeks ago, mass graves were discovered and streets were strewn with bodies in towns such as Bucha.
Before Shishimarin's sentencing, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow was unable to defend the soldier but will consider trying to do so “through other channels.”
Mary Ellen O’Connell, an expert on international law at the University of Notre Dame, said that putting Shishimarin on trial could prove “extremely detrimental to Ukrainian soldiers in the hands of Russia.” She said Russia may decide to hold “show trials” of Ukrainians to boost the morale of its own soldiers and spread disinformation.
“Maybe it would have happened without the Ukrainians beginning trials,” O’Connell said. “But the timing suggests that the Ukrainians should have held back and perhaps still should, so that the Russians can’t say, ‘We’re just doing to their soldiers what they did to ours.’”
Russian authorities have threatened to hold trials of captured Ukrainians — namely, fighters who held out at Mariupol’s shattered steel plant, the last stronghold of resistance in the strategic southern port city. They surrendered and were taken prisoner last week, at which point Moscow claimed the capture of Mariupol was complete.
Russia’s main investigative body said it intends to interrogate the Mariupol defenders to “identify the nationalists” and determine whether they were involved in crimes against civilians.
Russian authorities have seized upon the far-right origins of one of the regiments there, calling the Azov Regiment’s fighters “Nazis” and accusing their commander without evidence of “numerous atrocities." Russia’s top prosecutor has asked the country’s Supreme Court to designate the Azov Regiment a terrorist organization.
Family members of the fighters have pleaded for their eventual return to Ukraine as part of a prisoner swap.
Meanwhile, Boris Bondarev, a veteran Russian diplomat at the U.N. office at Geneva, quit and sent a letter denouncing the “aggressive war unleashed” by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bondarev told The Associated Press: “It is intolerable what my government is doing now."
In his letter, Bondarev said those who conceived the war “want only one thing — to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity.”
He also said Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs is all about "warmongering, lies and hatred.”
At the Davos forum, Zelenskyy said sanctions against the Kremlin must go further. He urged an embargo on Russian oil, a complete cutoff of trade and a withdrawal of foreign companies from the country.
“This is what sanctions should be: They should be maximum, so that Russia and every other potential aggressor that wants to wage a brutal war against its neighbor would clearly know the immediate consequences of their actions,” said Zelenskyy, who received a standing ovation.
On the battlefield, Russian forces increased their bombardment of the Donbas, the eastern industrial heartland of coal mines and factories that Russia is bent on capturing.
Donetsk's regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said three civilians died in Russian attacks there Monday and heavy fighting continued near the Luhansk region. The Donbas consists of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
He said the Russians were decimating cities in their attempt to take them over. Only about 320,000 people out of the region's prewar population of 1.6 million remain, and Russian forces are targeting evacuation efforts, he said.
“They are killing us. They are killing the locals during evacuation,” Kyrylenko said.
In the Luhansk region, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, local authorities reported that a bridge leading to the administrative center of Sievierodonetsk was destroyed, leaving the partially encircled city reachable by just one road.
Some who fled the Donetsk region shared their suffering.
“We haven’t been able to see the sun for three months. We are almost blind because we were in darkness for three months,” said Rayisa Rybalko, who hid with her family first in their basement and then in a bomb shelter at a school before fleeing their village of Novomykhailivka. “The world should have seen that.”
Her son-in-law Dmytro Khaliapin said heavy artillery pounded the village. “Houses are being ruined,” he said. “It’s a horror.”
Source: The Associated Press, Staff, May 23, 2022
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde