Ukrainian soldier released from captivity in July 2025 after a prisoner exchange between Kiev and Moscow, PHOTO: Efrem Lukatsky / AP / Profimedia Images
Fifteen members of a Ukrainian paramilitary group were convicted by a military court in Russia on Friday of participating in a “terrorist organization” and sentenced to between 15 and 21 years in a maximum-security penal colony, Russia's general prosecutor said, according to Reuters.
The men were members of Ukraine's Aidar Battalion and were captured in 2022. Their trial took place behind closed doors at a military court in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
There was no immediate reaction from Ukraine on the verdict, although the Kyiv Ombudsman previously described the trial as “disgraceful”.
Human rights organizations, including Russia's Memorial, argued that the prosecution of these men was a violation of the Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Memorial is the Russian non-governmental organization that was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize after President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow claims that the military was tried for acts during the Donbas War
Russia denies it violated the Geneva Conventions by indicting the Ukrainian prisoners and says the charges against them are based on activities they allegedly committed up to eight years before February 2022, during the conflict between Ukrainian regular forces and pro-Russian separatists in Donbas. The men were not charged with war crimes.
Aidar was one of dozens of volunteer battalions that emerged in Ukraine after fighting broke out in 2014 with Russian-backed groups that declared separatist “republics” in the country's east after Moscow illegally occupied and annexed Crimea. Ukrainian units, some with ultra-nationalist roots, were later integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces.
The charges against the men covered the period between August 2014 and March 2022, when they were accused of being part of a banned terrorist group and committing acts aimed at “the violent seizure of power and the overthrow of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation”.
Russian publication Mash quoted a lawyer for the accused as saying that two of them had pleaded guilty, but the other thirteen planned to appeal.
