A 21-year-old Russian sergeant is the first member of the Russian armed forces to be prosecuted for war crimes since the invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine’s attorney general announced on Wednesday. The New York Times†
The man is suspected of shooting an unarmed civilian on a bicycle on February 28, four days after the Russian invasion. He left the 62-year-old victim dead on the side of the road.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova released the results of an investigation conducted by the Ukrainian security service.
The suspected sergeant and four other soldiers were on the run from Ukrainian troops on February 28. They stole a car at gunpoint and drove to Chupakhivka, a village in the Sumy region, about 200 miles east of Kyiv.
There the soldier was ordered to kill the civilian so that he would not report them. He shot the man in the head with a Kalashnikov rifle from the window of the car and killed him on the spot, just a few tens of meters from his house.
The sergeant is on remand in Ukraine. He could face ten to fifteen years in prison. It was not clear how and when he was arrested. The date of the historical trial is also unknown.
Investigators collect evidence of war crimes
Both Ukrainian and international investigators have made huge efforts to collect evidence of possible war crimes in areas from which Russian troops have withdrawn.
Hundreds of bodies have been recovered for forensics, and United Nations officials are sending more resources to Ukrainian authorities to help prosecute mounting reports of rapes by Russian soldiers.