A Ukrainian court has convicted a Russian soldier of killing a Ukrainian prisoner in a January 2024 incident and sentenced him to life in prison in the first conviction of its kind.
Dmitry Kurashov, 27, was found guilty in a court in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya for shooting dead a Ukrainian soldier who had just surrendered to his troops.
Mr. Kurashov, who previously served time in a Russian prison for theft, signed a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense in November 2023 in exchange for a pardon, Ukrainian security officials said.
The court found Kurashov guilty of firing at Ukrainian soldiers at close range during an attack on January 6, 2024, near the village of Plyutne in the Zaporizhzhya region.
Security officials said the soldiers had already surrendered after running out of ammunition during the battle. According to prosecutors, the Ukrainians emerged from their trenches unarmed and raised their hands in a clear sign of surrender. He knelt down at the request of Russian soldiers, but was shot with an automatic weapon and died on the spot.
In another case, a Russian soldier was acquitted in March 2022 of a house robbery in the village of Bristavitsy in the Bucha district of Kyiv region. This decision was based on a lack of evidence.
Kurashov’s sentence is unprecedented and marks the first time since the start of the war that a Russian soldier has been imprisoned for killing a captured Ukrainian.
The Kiev government said many Ukrainian prisoners were killed by Russian forces, but so far there have been no legal repercussions.
Earlier this year, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine announced that as of May 5, it had opened 75 criminal investigations into the alleged executions of 268 Ukrainian prisoners of war.
According to the report, the number of suspected executions of Ukrainian prisoners of war is on the rise, with eight cases involving 57 soldiers in 2022, eight cases involving 11 soldiers in 2023, 39 cases involving 149 soldiers in 2024, and 20 cases involving 51 soldiers as of May 5 this year.
