BAKHMUT, Ukraine –
Two British nationals and a Moroccan man were sentenced to death on Thursday for fighting alongside Ukraine, in a punishment imposed by the country’s pro-Moscow rebels.
A court in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic found the three men guilty of working for a violent overthrow of power, a crime punishable by death in the unrecognized Eastern Republic. They were also convicted of mercenary activities and terrorism.
Russia’s RIA Novosti state news agency reported that the three – Aiden Aslin, Shaun Pinner and Saaudun Brahim – will face a firing squad. They have a month to go.
The separatists argued that the three fighters were “mercenaries” who were not entitled to the usual protections granted to prisoners of war. They are the first foreign fighters to be convicted by Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists.
The families of Aslin and Pinner had claimed that the men, who are said to have been living in Ukraine since 2018, were “long-time” members of the Ukrainian army.
British Foreign Secretary Luz Truss condemned the sentence as a “false sentence with absolutely no legitimacy”. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman Jamie Davies said that under the Geneva Conventions, prisoners of war have the right to immunity as combatants.
The three men fought alongside Ukrainian troops. Pinner and Aslin surrendered to pro-Russian forces in the southern port of Mariupol in mid-April, while Brahim did so in mid-March in the eastern city of Volnovakha.
The Russian military has argued that foreign mercenaries fighting alongside Ukraine are not combatants and should wait for a long prison sentence, at best, if captured. Another British fighter captured by pro-Russian forces, Andrew Hill, is awaiting trial.
Meanwhile, Russian forces hit the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk in a fierce street-by-street fight that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said could determine the fate of the Donbas, the country’s industrial center of coal mines and factories.
Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian troops in the Donbas for years and occupied strips of territory before the invasion.
“Fierce battles continue in the same city, street battles are taking place with varying successes in the city blocks,” said Serhiy Haidai, governor of Luhansk Province. “The Ukrainian army is fighting for every street and house.”
Sievierodonetsk is part of the last pocket of Luhansk that the Russians have yet to seize.
Zelenskyy called the close struggle for the city the “epicenter” of the battle for the great Donbas, which consists of the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces.
“In many ways, this is where the fate of our Donbas is being decided,” Zelenskyy said Wednesday in his nightly video address, which was recorded on the street in front of his office in Kyiv.
Ukraine’s top military official said the situation on the front lines was “very difficult” and called for “very fast” arms supplies.
Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in a Facebook post that up to 100 Ukrainian soldiers are being killed every day. “We, as a country, cannot afford to bleed, losing our best sons and daughters,” he said.
In other developments:
– Haidai said Russian forces are also targeting Lysychansk, the neighboring city of Sievierodonetsk, with “day and night shells” and trying to storm a key road from Lysychansk to the southwest.
– Russia claimed to have hit a training facility west of the capital, far from the front lines. Russia’s Defense Ministry says it used air-fired missiles against a Ukrainian military base in the Zhytomyr region where it alleged that mercenaries were being trained.
There was no immediate response from the Ukrainian authorities to the Russian statements. Moscow has repeatedly accused Ukraine of using mercenaries in combat.
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