3 foreigners sentenced to death fighting for Ukraine
Putin casts himself as modern version of Peter the Great
BAKHMUT, Ukraine — Two British citizens and a Moroccan were sentenced to death Thursday for fighting on Ukraine’s side, in a punishment handed down by the country’s pro-Moscow rebels.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to liken himself to conquering monarch Peter the Great and spoke of his country’s need to “take back” territory and “defend itself” as the Kremlin’s forces continued a grinding war of attrition in eastern Ukraine.
A court in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in Ukraine found the three captured fighters guilty of working toward a violent overthrow of power, an offense punishable by death in the unrecognized eastern republic. They were also convicted of mercenary activities and terrorism.
Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti reported the men — identified as Aiden Aslin, Shaun Pinner and Ibrahim Saadoun — will face a firing squad. They have a month to appeal.
The separatist side argued that the three fighters were “mercenaries” not entitled to the usual protections accorded prisoners of war. The men are the first foreign fighters sentenced by Ukraine’s Russian-backed separatists.
British Foreign Secretary Luz Truss condemned the sentencing as a “sham judgment with absolutely no legitimacy.” Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman Jamie Davies said that under the Geneva Conventions, POWs are entitled to immunity as combatants.
Saadoun’s father, Taher Saadoun, told the Moroccan online Arab-language newspaper Madar 21 that his son is not a mercenary and that he holds Ukrainian citizenship.
Aslin’s and Pinner’s families have contended that the two men were long-serving members of the Ukrainian military. Both are said to have lived in Ukraine since 2018.
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 Saadoun did so in mid-March in the eastern city of Volnovakha.
The Russian military has argued that foreign mercenaries fighting on Ukraine’s side are not combatants and should expect long prison terms, at best, if captured. Another British fighter captured by the pro-Russian forces, Andrew Hill, is awaiting trial.
Russian investigators also said Thursday that they had opened more than 1,100 cases into “crimes against peace” committed by the Ukrainian government, paving the way for what could turn into a mass show trial of hundreds of Ukrainian service members.
As the war raged in a key city in Ukraine’s Donbas region and other parts of the country, Russia’s president drew parallels between Peter the Great’s founding of St. Petersburg in the 18th century on land captured from Sweden and modernday Russia’s ambitions.
When Peter founded the new capital, “no European country recognized it as Russia. Everybody recognized it as Sweden,” Putin
said. He added: “What was (Peter) doing? Taking back and reinforcing. That’s what he did. And it looks like it fell on us to take back and reinforce as well.”
The czar is known for waging war against the Ottoman Empire to seize the Crimean Peninsula, bringing Western technology and culture to Russia and establishing the nation’s navy.
Putin also appeared to leave the door open for further Russian territorial expansion.
“It’s impossible — do you understand? — impossible to build a fence around a country like Russia. And we
do not intend to build that fence,” he said.
Russian forces continued to pound the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk in fierce, street-by-street combat that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said could determine the fate of the Donbas, the country’s industrial heartland.
Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian troops for years in the Donbas and held swaths of territory before the invasion.
“Fierce battles continue in the city itself, street battles are taking place with varied success in city blocks,”
Serhiy Haidai, governor of Luhansk province. “The army of Ukraine is fighting for every street and house.”
Sievierodonetsk is part of the last pocket of Luhansk that Russians have yet to seize. The Donbas is made up of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces.
Zelenskyy called the fight for the city the “epicenter” of the battle for the Donbas.
“In many ways, it is there that the fate of our Donbas is being decided,” Zelenskyy said Wednesday in his nightly video address.