Several Ukrainian officers charged in absentia with shelling Donbas civilians - Russian Investigative Committee
MOSCOW. Jan 19 (Interfax) - The Russian Investigative Committee has brought charges of shelling Donbas civilians against a number of high-ranking Ukrainian military officials in absentia and is ready to hand evidence in criminal cases over to international courts, the Russian Investigative Committee spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko said.
"The names of commanders of Ukrainian Armed Forces units, which participated in artillery bombardments of civilian infrastructure facilities and populations in southeastern Ukraine have been identified," Petrenko told Interfax on Thursday.
According to investigators, on May 26, 2015, the Ukrainian Armed Forces servicemen carried out an artillery bombardment with heavy weapons aimed at residential buildings on Planernaya and Ozeryanovskaya streets of the city of Horlivka and adjacent territories, following which a man named Yury Tuv, a girl born in 2004, and an unidentified woman were killed while a woman named Anna Tuv and young children born in 2012 and 2015 were injured.
"Investigators have established that apart from Col. Oleh Lysovoi, who had been charged in absentia earlier, the commander of the first artillery battalion of the 44th separate artillery brigade Lt. Col. Vyktor Yushko is involved in organizing and carrying out the aforementioned shelling of civilians," Petrenko said.
She said that on June 15, 2016, Ukrainian servicemen carried out an artillery bombardment aimed at the populated localities of Krasnohorivka and Staromykhailivka in the Donetsk region, following which two civilians not involved in the armed conflict sustained varying degree of injuries, a non-residential building used as a depot was fully destroyed and residential buildings damaged.
"Investigators have currently obtained information on the involvement in this crime of the commander of the 46th separate special operations squadron of the tenth separate mountain assault brigade Lt. Col. of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Vyacheslav Vlasenko. The commander of the tenth separate mountain assault brigade Vasyl Zubanych is also a defendant in this criminal case," she sad.
She said that investigators have brought charges of using prohibited means and methods of warfare (the part 1 of the article 356 of the Russian Criminal Code) in absentia against Yushko and Vlasenko.
"The current legislation allows us to investigate the aforementioned crimes and adopt decisions in accordance with Russian law. But if necessary, we are ready to hand these materials over to international judicial authorities at any moment," Petrenko said.
She added that investigators of the department for investigation of crimes committed using prohibited means and methods of warfare of the Russian Investigative Committee's Main Investigative Directorate have so far collected 5330 volumes of the criminal case including proof that Ukrainian military officials have committed grave and especially grave crimes against civilians.