Russia bombs children’s hospital while sentencing Ukrainian POWs to life ‘for killing civilians’
Russia has used fake ‘courts’ in occupied Ukraine to sentence another two Ukrainian defenders to life imprisonment in one case, and 26 years in the other. The ‘trials’ staged by the aggressor state were on unproven charges of killing and injuring civilians and targeting civilian infrastructure, i.e. those war crimes that Russia is committing on a virtually daily basis in Ukraine. There is a vast amount of video footage, witness testimony and material evidence proving Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s hospitals, residential buildings and critical energy infrastructure. With respect to the ‘trials’ and sentences against Ukrainian prisoners of war, the only ‘evidence’ would appear to be ‘confessions’ given while the men were held incommunicado and almost certainly extracted through torture.
All of these ‘trials’ in occupied parts of Ukraine are reported by Russia’s Investigative Committee after sentences have been passed with no way of knowing even whether the men had lawyers. UN monitors who have interviewed Ukrainian prisoners of war released in exchanges have reported that virtually all were tortured and ill-treated.
Oleksiy Kazymov
Russia’s Investigative Committee announced on 3 July that the occupation ‘Donetsk people’s republic high court’ had sentenced Senior Lieutenant Oleksiy Kazymov, acting commander of a mortar platoon of Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade, to 26 years’ harsh-regime imprisonment.
Kazymov is, undoubtedly, a prisoner of war [POW] with protected status under international humanitarian law. While soldiers can be held to account for grave crimes, including war crimes, such crimes must be adequately proven, and the POWs’ right to a fair trial observed. Here we know only that ‘a trial’ ended on or before 3 July, with a massive sentence passed by anonymous ‘judges’ of an unrecognized ‘court’. Russia is staging these judicial travesties on occupied territory, with no access to international organizations or independent media while holding the prisoners of war incommunicado.
The charges, furthermore, are essentially identical from one such ‘trial’ to the next, with the Ukrainian POWs illegally charged under articles of Russia’s criminal code. Kazymov was ‘convicted’ both of ‘the murder and the attempted murder of two or more people, carried out by an organized group out of motives of political and ideological enmity (Article 105 § 2a, f, h and m); of ‘deliberate damage of others’ property causing significant law and carried out in a publicly dangerous manner (Article 167 § 2); and of ‘cruel treatment of the civilian population, the use in an armed conflict of prohibited means and methods (Article 356 § 1).
The only major difference here was that the alleged actions were supposed to have taken place in 2019, at a time when Russia had not even formally ‘recognized’ the so-called ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ which it had created and controlled. Pavlopil, the village around 25 kilometres from Mariupol, was under Ukrainian control in 2019, and was only seized by the Russians after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. All of this makes the charges against Kazymov, who was 27 at the time, especially surreal. He is alleged to have ordered the shelling of three inhabited points, during which one person died and another was injured, and 19 sites of civic infrastructure were damaged.
It is likely that the only ‘evidence’ to back such assertions came from Kazymov’s videoed ‘confession’. We know from essentially all released prisoners of war and civilian hostages that such ‘confessions’ are extracted through electric shocks, beatings, mock executions and other forms of torture.
Myroslav Chornomor
On 4 July, the same Investigative Committee reported yet another sentence from this same illegitimate ‘Donetsk people’s republic high court’. The aggressor state’s puppet ‘court’ had sentenced Myroslav Chornomor, the commander of a reconnaissance unit of the 36th Marine Brigade to life imprisonment in especially harsh conditions, with this purportedly ‘for killing civilians in Mariupol.’
The charges (under Article 105 § 2a, h and m) and Article 356 § 1) were virtually identical to those above, only without the charge of causing significant damage to property.
Here too, they are almost certainly based solely on the ‘testimony’ which Chornomor was probably forced to learn off by heart. The very indictment makes it quite clear how flawed the charges are, with the alleged shooting of five civilians having supposedly taken place “on one of the days between 20 March and 12 April 2022.” One of the five had, purportedly, managed to escape. In the second impugned incident, Chornomor is supposed to have shot two men for their ‘pro-Russian views’, while another is alleged to have fled.
It became clear within months of Russia’s seizure of Mariupol that its security service [FSB] was using Mariupol residents forcibly taken to Russia for fake ‘testimony’ blaming Ukrainian defenders for Russia’s war crimes. A young woman was even videoed giving a garbled story claiming that Ukrainian soldiers had somehow “from within” bombed the Mariupol Drama Theatre in which around a thousand civilians were hiding from Russian bombs.
See also
Russia sentences four Ukrainian POWs to life imprisonment for defending Mariupol
Ukrainian POWs sentenced to life for Russia’s war crimes in Mariupol