A Finnish district court announced today that it had found a Russian guilty of war crimes in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, sentencing him to life in prison, Reuters reports.
The trial of Jan Petrovsky, also known as Voislav Torden, was a rare case of prosecutors outside Ukraine seeking justice for victims of alleged war crimes in a conflict that began long before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Petrovsky, who was born in 1987, faced five charges related to his activities in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine a decade ago.
Petrovsky, who has been under sanctions by the European Union and the United States (US) since 2022, has denied all charges, his lawyer Heikki Lampella told a court in Helsinki last December.
Radio Free Europe's English-language service announced at the end of October last year that the Finnish prosecutor's office had indicted Russian ultranationalist and former commander of the Rusich sabotage group, Voislav Torden, for war crimes committed in Ukraine in 2014.
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