By Max Hunder and Andrius Sytas
KYIV/VILNIUS (Reuters) -Ukraine has handed over a captured Russian soldier accused of torture and illegal detention to Lithuania for trial, in what Kyiv said was the first case of its kind involving the justice system of a third country during Russia’s nearly four-year-old war.
The soldier, described by Lithuania as a Russian marine, is suspected of working at a detention centre set up in Melitopol airport in 2022 in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine, where one of the victims was a Lithuanian citizen, Lithuanian General Prosecutor Nida Grunskiene told reporters in Vilnius on Friday.
The suspect was arrested on the frontline in Ukraine in 2023 and was handed over on Wednesday to Lithuania, where he was detained by a court for three months and charged with war crimes against civilians and prisoners of war, including their torture and illegal imprisonment, Grunskiene said.
Neither the Kremlin nor the Russian diplomatic mission in Vilnius responded immediately to a request for comment. Russia has previously denied using torture or other forms of maltreatment against detainees.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko said the transfer of the Russian soldier created an important historical precedent for international justice.
“For the first time since the start of (Russia’s) full-scale aggression, Ukraine has transferred a Russian serviceman to a foreign state – Lithuania – for real criminal prosecution for war crimes,” he said on the Telegram messaging app.
LITHUANIA DETAILS ALLEGED TORTURE OF POWS, CIVILIANS
Grunskiene said the marine was suspected, along with other Russian soldiers, not only of guarding illegally detained civilians and POWs but also of beating and torturing them.
The torture included imprisoning the victims in a metal safe, suffocating them until they lost consciousness, dousing them with icy water in cold weather and administering electric shocks, said Grunskiene.
Lithuanian and Ukrainian prosecutors said they had worked together to establish the identity of the detained soldier and some other servicemen at the camp.
The Lithuanian citizen believed to have been tortured by the defendant was a civilian and had not taken part in the war, said Kravchenko.
Kyiv has accused Russia of committing more than 180,000 war crimes during its invasion of Ukraine.
The vast majority of war crimes cases against Russia are being investigated by Ukraine and tried locally, but the International Criminal Court in the Hague, which Ukraine officially joined this year, has also conducted investigations into high-profile cases.
Grunskiene said Lithuania, a NATO and EU member state, was currently working to determine and sentence those guilty of atrocities against other Lithuanian citizens in Ukraine, including film director Mantas Kvedaravicius, killed in Mariupol in March 2022.
Last month, the U.N. human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine published a report accusing Russia of systematically torturing Ukrainian civilians in over 100 detention centres in occupied Ukraine and Russia since the start of the war.
Russia declined to comment on the report.
(Reporting by Max Hunder in Kyiv and Andrius Sytas in VilniusEditing by Gareth Jones)
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