Vadim, the child sergeant in the courtroom for war crimes in Ukraine – Corriere.it

from our reporter

Kyiv Low eyes, not a word. Sergeant and alleged war criminal Vadim Shishimarin He’s in the defendant’s glass cage, and in front of those glasses is a wall of cellphones and cameras filming him. He is a man of this war time. He, in his gray and blue shirt, is 21 years old, with his hair shaved off and his face as a child. Accused of “violating the laws and customs of war”. Yesterday he met for the first time the judges of the Solomiansky District Court in Kyiv at the preliminary hearing. It will be up to them to decide what debt he will have to pay to justice for doing what he did. And this is the shooting of a poor man who was unfortunately down the same path as him.

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It was February 28, and the war had begun four days earlier. Vadim was in command of Unit 32010, 4th Tank Division of the Kantemirovskaya Guards, Moscow Region. He and his men were in the village of Chubakhiva in the province SumiWhen the unit was attacked. To escape, he and four others stole a car, and as they were leaving the village, they bumped into this man: a 62-year-old man on a bicycle was walking toward his house, now a few meters away. He was talking on his cell phone, that guy. They thought he was warning some Ukrainian soldiers about their presence. This was said by Vadim. He swore, “They told me to shoot and I couldn’t refuse. I shot from the window with my Kalashnikov. Several shots and the man on the bike couldn’t escape.”

The young Russian sergeant has been facing a life sentence for ten years. Four days ago she was the prosecutor, Irina Venediktova
To announce his indictment by publishing a summary of the accusations and the identity and photo of the accused, as usual. It is the first public trial for crimes committed during this war and the Public Prosecutor has announced in the past hours that the suspected perpetrators of war crimes have already been identified, while the number of cases still pending has risen to 10,700… for those responsible. Like many other soldiers captured by the Ukrainian army, Volodymyr Zulkin gave an interview to Vadim Shishimarin, a blogger and journalist who was allowed to talk with and videotape prisoners of war.

In the interview we saw him wearing the same gray and blue shirt he was wearing yesterday. “I went to war to help my mother who has no money,” he says, repeating what he told Ukrainian security forces who interrogated him immediately after his capture. He says his unit was told it was a drill in a Russian town, not the war against Ukraine. “It was supposed to be a military exercise in Voronezh,” he says. But here he is. He is imprisoned in front of the Kyiv court, which provided him with a Russian translator and a lawyer. Next hearing: May 18.