Ukraine has handed over a captured Russian soldier accused of torture and illegal detention to Lithuania to face trial, Reuters reported, quoted by BTA.
Kiev said it was the first case since the start of the war in which the judicial authorities of a third country had intervened.
The soldier, who Lithuania said was a Russian marine, is suspected of having worked at a detention center at the Melitopol airport in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine in 2022, with a Lithuanian citizen among the victims, Lithuania's Prosecutor General Nida Grunskiene told reporters today.
The suspect was arrested in 2023 on frontline in Ukraine and was handed over to Lithuania on Wednesday, where he has been held for three months. He faces charges of war crimes against civilians and prisoners of war, including torture and illegal detention, Grunskiene said.
The Kremlin and the Russian diplomatic mission in Vilnius have not commented on the matter. Russia has previously denied any cases of torture or other forms of ill-treatment of detainees.
Ukraine's Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko said the transfer of the Russian soldier was an important historical precedent for international law.
"For the first time since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has transferred a Russian serviceman to a foreign country – Lithuania, to be tried for war crimes," he wrote on Telegram.
Grunskiene said the marine was suspected, along with other Russian soldiers, of not only guarding illegally detained civilians and prisoners of war, but also of beating and torturing them. The torture included locking the victims in a metal safe, beating and suffocating them until they lost consciousness, dousing them with ice water in cold weather and using electric shocks on them, Grunskiene said.
Lithuanian and Ukrainian prosecutors said they were working 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 accused was a civilian and did not participate in the war, Kravchenko said.