Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine began Monday trying three Britons, a Croat and a Swede accused of fighting with the Ukrainian army, which could earn them the death penalty.
The “Supreme Court” of the separatist region of Donetsk has opened the trial of John Harding, Andrew Hill, Dylan Healy, originally from the United Kingdom, as well as Croatian Vjekoslav Prebeg and Swedish Mathias Gustafsson, Russian media reported.
John Harding, Vjekoslav Prebeg and Mathias Gustafsson, taken prisoner in the area of the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, besieged and bombed for weeks by the Russian army, incur the death penalty, according to a judge quoted by the TASS news agency. .
According to the Ria-Novosti agency, these three men who are at risk of being executed are being prosecuted for trying to “seize power by force” and for “participating in an armed conflict as mercenaries”.
Foreign fighters already sentenced to death
The British Andrew Hill is accused solely of mercenary activity, while Dylan Healy is prosecuted for “having participated in the recruitment of mercenaries” for Ukraine, according to the Ria-Novosti agency.
The court indicated that the trial of the five defendants will not resume until early October, without giving any explanation as to the reasons for this delay. All have pleaded not guilty, according to Russian media. By early June, two British fighters and a Moroccan had already been sentenced to death by Donetsk separatists. They appealed this decision.
A moratorium on the death penalty has been in place in Russia since 1997, but this is not the case in the two breakaway territories in eastern Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his army on February 24 to invade Ukraine, whose forces have fiercely resisted ever since, in Europe’s most violent conflict since World War II.
Source: BFM TV
