Ukraine's top prosecutor says the country plans to hold its first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier. Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said Wednesday that her office charged 21-year-old Sgt. Vadin Shyshimarin in the Feb. 28 killing of an unarmed 62-year-old civilian in northeastern Ukraine.
She didn't say when the trial will start, but her office has said it has been investigating more than 10,700 alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and has identified over 600 suspects. Meanwhile, Ukraine shut down one of the pipelines that carry Russian gas across the country to Western Europe. And a Kremlin-installed official in the captured Kherson region says he wants Moscow to annex the region.
“The city of Kherson is Russia,” Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kherson regional administration appointed by Moscow, told Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency.
The move raised the possibility that the Kremlin would seek to break off another piece of Ukraine as it tries to salvage an invasion gone awry, the Associated Press reported. Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which borders the Kherson region, after a disputed referendum in 2014, a move denounced as illegal and rejected by most of the international community.
