A Ukrainian soldier captured by militants from the self-proclaimed ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ has been sentenced in DPR to 30 years’ imprisonment. The Russian-controlled militants are claiming that 21-year-old Volodymyr Voskoboinyk was planning acts of ‘sabotage’. The young man is a prisoner of war who should not be prosecuted, and certainly not on the basis of a ‘confession’ that was almost certainly extracted through beatings and torture.
Voskoboinyk was just 19 when he volunteered to join the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He had wanted to join in 2014, after his brother-in-law was killed fighting in Donbas, but was too young. His father died in 2014, and he remained at home with his mother, since his four sisters are older and live separately.
