KYIV (Reuters) – A Kyiv district court docket met on Wednesday to start hearing its first war crimes trial in opposition to a Russian soldier who took half in Moscow’s Feb. 24 invasion, a case of big symbolic worth for Ukraine.
Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old Russian tank commander held in Ukraine, is charged with murdering a 62-year-old civilian in the northeast Ukrainian village of Chupakhivka on Feb. 28. He informed the court docket that he pleaded responsible.
If convicted Shishimarin faces as much as life imprisonment.
The Kyiv authorities has accused Russia of atrocities and brutality in opposition to civilians throughout the invasion and stated it has recognized greater than 10,000 attainable war crimes.
Russia has denied concentrating on civilians or involvement in war crimes and accused Kyiv of staging them to smear its forces.
Ukrainian state prosecutors have stated the soldier and 4 different Russian servicemen fired at and stole a privately owned automobile to flee after their column was focused by Ukrainian forces.
The Russian troopers drove into the village of Chupakhivka the place they noticed an unarmed resident using a bicycle and speaking on his cellphone, they stated.
They stated Shishimarin was ordered by one other serviceman to kill the civilian to stop him reporting on the Russians’ presence and fired a number of pictures by way of the open window of the automobile with an assault rifle on the civilian’s head. The civilian died on the spot.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Writing by Tom Balmforth, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
