Russian jailed for life in Finland for Ukraine war crimes

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HELSINKI (Reuters) -A Russian man was jailed for life by a Finnish court on Friday for war crimes committed in 2014 in eastern Ukraine, where his paramilitary group was found to have killed an injured soldier.

The trial of Yan Petrovsky, also known as Voislav Torden, was a rare case of foreign prosecutors addressing war crimes from the anti-Kyiv insurgency that Moscow backed in eastern Ukraine, long before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Petrovsky, who was born in 1987, was found guilty of four out of five charges related to his activities in Ukraine’s Luhansk province, part of the industrial Donbass region.

Petrovsky was a member of Rusich, a paramilitary unit affiliated with the Russian Wagner mercenary group, the court said. He has been under European Union and U.S. sanctions since 2022.

The court found him guilty on four of five counts, including his unit’s killing of a wounded Ukrainian soldier, the mutilation of another, and the taking and publishing of degrading images of dead soldiers.

“A fixed-term prison sentence was not an adequate punishment,” the court said in its verdict.

Petrovsky was detained in Finland at Ukraine’s request in 2023 as he tried to travel to France under a false identity. Finland’s supreme court later blocked his extradition to Ukraine.

The court dismissed one charge, finding it unproven that Petrovsky’s Rusich unit had organised and carried out an ambush under the pretence of being Ukrainians in which 22 Ukrainian soldiers were killed, even though it found Rusich fighters had been present.

Petrovsky denied all the charges and will appeal, his lawyer said.

(Reporting by Essi Lehto, editing by Terje Solsvik and Stine Jacobsen)