MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — A court in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, began hearings Friday in the case against Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, the first Russian soldier to go on trial for alleged war crimes. He is accused of shooting a 62-year-old civilian in the northeastern Ukrainian region of Sumy in late February.
A spokesperson for Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office said Friday that the hearing was a “preparatory meeting” and was set to start at noon local time at Kyiv’s Solomianskyi district court.
Shishimarin, 21, a commander in Russia’s Kantemirovskaya tank division, is in Ukrainian custody. He is charged with violating “the laws and customs of war combined with premeditated murder,” for which he could face up to 15 years in prison if found guilty, Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, said in a statement on Facebook on Wednesday.
Shishimarin is accused of killing an unarmed civilian who was pushing a bicycle on the side of a road in the village of Chupakhivka, firing several shots from his Kalashnikov rifle on Feb. 28, Venediktova’s statement said.
The man was speaking on his phone, and “one of the soldiers ordered the sergeant to kill the civilian so that he would not report them to Ukrainian defenders,” the statement said. “The man died on the spot just a few dozen meters from his home.”
Ukraine’s decision to place captured soldiers on trial for war crimes in the middle of a conflict is uncommon, human rights and legal experts say. But it also has the advantage of giving prosecutors access to fresh evidence, including eyewitness testimonies.
“The evidence is very fresh in Ukraine, and it’s being gathered very professionally, from what I have seen,” said Robert Goldman, a war crimes and human rights expert at American University’s Washington College of Law.