Three Britons accused of being mercenaries will stand trial in a Russian proxy court docket in jap Ukraine.
John Harding, Cambridgeshire help employee Dylan Healy, 22, and navy volunteer Andrew Hill might be tried within the Moscow-backed Supreme Court docket of the Donetsk Individuals’s Republic, in line with Russian state information company Tass.
Tass reported all three males had been refusing to co-operate with investigators. They are going to be tried alongside two different males from Croatia and Sweden as “international residents accused of mercenarism”, a court docket consultant instructed the company.
Prosecutors allege all 5 males had been members of the Azov battalion and different navy items captured in Mariupol.
Tass additionally stated 60-year-old Mr Harding had fought in Syria on the Kurdish facet however had denied killing anybody.
It comes after a video proven on Russian tv in April featured a person talking with an English accent who appeared to present his title as Andrew Hill from Plymouth.
The Donetsk court docket final month sentenced British males Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner to dying in what the Overseas Workplace considers “sham judgements”, with the European Court docket of Human Rights pressured to intervene within the case.
The Strasbourg-based court docket indicated to Moscow that it ought to make sure the dying penalty imposed on Mr Aslin, 28, initially from Newark in Nottinghamshire, and Mr Pinner, 48, from Bedfordshire, was not carried out.
(Matt Cardy/PA)
(PA Archive)
The Overseas Workplace is known to be actively investigating and is offering help to the lads’s households.
A spokeswoman stated: “We condemn the exploitation of prisoners of struggle and civilians for political functions and have raised this with Russia.
“We’re in fixed contact with the federal government of Ukraine on their circumstances and are absolutely supportive of Ukraine in its efforts to get them launched.”
Amnesty Worldwide UK final month criticised Moscow for “exploiting” the lads’s seize.
The charity’s disaster response supervisor Kristyan Benedict stated: “In exploiting their seize of Dylan Healy and Andrew Hill like this, Russia and its proxies within the Donetsk Individuals’s Republic are already including to an enormous catalogue of struggle crimes they’re committing on this struggle.”
The Russian international ministry on Monday issued a listing of 39 newly sanctioned people – together with David Cameron, Sir Keir Starmer and BBC presenter Huw Edwards – it stated are now not allowed to enter the Russian Federation.
It stated the motion was in response to UK sanctions issued towards Russian ministers, officers and members of influential households linked to the Kremlin following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
