U.S. CHARGES 4 RUSSIANS WITH WAR CRIMES
The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had charged four Russian soldiers with torturing an American living in the warravaged region of Kherson in Ukraine, using a war crimes statute for the first time since it was enacted nearly three decades ago.
The indictment, unsealed in Virginia, could be followed by other charges against Russians found to have committed “atrocities on the largest scale in any European armed conflict since the Second World
War,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in announcing the prosecution.
Garland also acknowledged that the department had begun a formal investigation of the “murder of more than 30 Americans” by Hamas fighters during the Oct. 7 attack in Israel, either under the same war crimes law being used against the Russian soldiers or through the use of anti-terrorism statutes. He provided no other details.
All four of those charged now live in Russia. The prospects that they would travel abroad anytime soon, where they could be captured, are remote, officials who joined Garland at the news conference said.
The American in the Ukraine case was not identified in court filings. But prosecutors said he was abducted in April 2022 from his home in Mylove, a village in southern Ukraine, despite telling Russian forces moving into the area that he was not a combatant and had been living in the country with his wife since 2021.
During the victim’s roughly 10 days in captivity, soldiers with the Russian armed forces and paramilitaries with the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic beat him with their fists and their guns and threatened to sexually assault him. In one harrowing episode, according to prosecutors, they hauled him from the building where he was being held captive to stage a mock execution — which ended when a bullet was fired inches from his temple as he knelt on the ground.
The two commanders, identified as Suren Seiranovich Mkrtchyan and Dmitry Budnik, along with two subordinates identified only by their first names, subjected the man to two particularly vicious interrogation sessions, prosecutors said. They stripped him naked, then photographed him, all the while accusing him of being a U.S. government operative.
The American was eventually released and evacuated back to the United States, officials added.