Ukraine yesterday accused two captured Russian servicemen of having killed Ukrainian troops in fighting in its east and said they would be prosecuted for “terrorist acts”.
The Ukrainians seized on the capture of the two Russians, both wounded, to support their accusations of direct Russian military involvement in the separatist conflict despite a ceasefire signed in February. Russia denied any role there.
In a video posted online by the Ukrainian interior ministry, one of the prisoners gave his name as Alexander Alexandrov. He said he had been on a spying mission in Ukraine as part of a 14-member special forces group from the central Russian town of Togliatti.
“We were discovered. I was wounded in the leg as I tried to get away ... We’ve been here 4-5 days,” he said.
The capture and possible prosecution of the two Russians and the potential embarrassment for Russia’s Vladimir Putin come as the United States and its European Union allies press Moscow to fully implement the Minsk peace accords as a step to ending the crisis. More than 6,100 people have been killed and Russia-West ties plunged into crisis since pro-Moscow separatists rebelled against a pro-Western leadership when it took power in Ukraine more than a year ago. Russia accuses Kiev of violating the truce. Military spokesman Andriy Lysenko alluded to a similar previous incident and the explanation offered then by Putin.
Captured soldier says he was on a spying mission in Ukraine from a Russian town
“The leadership of the Russian Federation will have difficulty saying that these guys just got lost,” he said. Ukrainian chief of staff Viktor Muzhenko told journalists that a Ukrainian soldier had carried one of the wounded Russian officers on his shoulders “while small arms and mortar fire” had continued around him.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said in Brussels that other Russians had been trying to kill the two captured men.
“We are completely certain and can state that these are citizens and servicemen of the Russian Federation,” said Markiyan Lubkivsky, a senior Ukrainian state security official. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked to comment, said: “Both we and the defence ministry have said multiple times that there are no Russian servicemen in Donbass.” Donbass is the colloquial term for Ukraine’s industrialised east.
One Ukrainian soldier was killed in the fighting at Shchastya near Luhansk, on Saturday, while some Ukrainian state security officials had been wounded, state security chief Valentyn Nalivaychenko told journalists. Nalivaychenko said the two captured Russians had personally killed Ukrainian troops.
“These Russian soldiers were completing their military task. They were going to kill our troops, kill our people,” military spokesman Lysenko said.
Nalivaychenko said the captured soldiers had been part of a group which had carried out acts “with a terrorist aim with guns in their hands against our citizens”.