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For the first time since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has transferred a Russian prisoner of war to a third country. The POW was handed over to Lithuania, where he is set to stand trial for the torture of a Lithuanian citizen, according to a Oct. 31 report by Deutsche Welle.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko said in a Telegram post that the suspect was taken into custody in Lithuania on Oct. 30. The man had served in Russia’s military police and was captured in 2023 near the village of Robotyne.
A video attached to Kravchenko’s post shows that Russian forces had set up a filtration camp at an airfield in occupied Melitopol, where Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war were held in inhumane conditions: they were beaten, electrocuted, and deprived of food and water. Among those detained was a Lithuanian citizen who had been in Ukraine on a private trip.
The video also shows the Russian POW, his face blurred, being escorted in handcuffs by members of Ukraine’s National Guard as he is driven across the border. He faces a possible life sentence in Lithuania.
This is not the first case of a European country trying a Russian citizen for crimes committed in Ukraine. In March, a Finnish court sentenced Russian neo-Nazi Voislav Torden to life imprisonment. Torden was a member of the far-right paramilitary group Rusich, which took part in an armed attack on soldiers of Ukraine’s Aidar battalion in the Luhansk Region of Ukraine in 2014. He was also involved in the torture and killing of Ukrainian prisoners, some of which he filmed and posted online.