Ukraine on Friday said it had handed over a captured Russian soldier to Lithuania, where he will be put on trial for alleged war crimes, an extradition it hailed as a "historic" first.
"For the first time since the start of full-scale aggression, Ukraine has handed over a Russian serviceman to a foreign state, Lithuania, for real criminal prosecution for war crimes," Ukraine's prosecutor general Ruslan Kravchenko said on Telegram.
Kyiv is determined to hold Russian military figures personally responsible for the 2022 invasion and is seeking international justice for numerous alleged atrocities committed by the Russian army.
Officials said the extradited man — a sailor who had served in the Russian military police — was captured by the Ukrainian army in the Zaporizhzhia region near the southern village of Robotyne.
He was “involved in the illegal detention, torture, and inhumane treatment of civilians and prisoners of war,” Kravchenko said.
One of his victims was a Lithuanian citizen, Kravchenko added.
He said Vilnius was pressing war crimes charges against the man who could face life imprisonment in the Baltic state, a NATO and EU member and Ukraine's staunch ally.
Kravchenko called the extradition “a historic and important precedent for the entire international justice system.”
“It is a clear signal to every war criminal: you will not be able to hide from justice in any country of the free world.”
The Lithuanian prosecutor general's office said in a statement that the country's law enforcement officers had cooperated with Kyiv on the case.
“It is suspected that together with other Russian soldiers, the suspect not only guarded the illegally detained civilians and prisoners of war, but also participated in their beating and torture,” it said.
It alleged the torture involved “imprisoning the victims in a metal safe, suffocating them until unconsciousness, hanging them with tied hands, pouring cold water on them in freezing weather, and traumatising with electric shocks.”
A court in Vilnius has ruled to keep the man in jail for at least three months ahead of a trial, the prosecutor general's office said.
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