A court in Finland found a Russian paramilitary fighter guilty of war crimes committed during Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, sentencing him to life in prison on Friday.
Voislav Torden, a Russian citizen who also goes by the name Yan Petrovskiy, was charged with committing war crimes for leading an ambush on Ukrainian soldiers in 2014, when Russian-backed forces first invaded Ukraine’s eastern front, according to the court ruling.
It was the first time a court in Finland presided over a case involving an alleged international war crime committed during the conflict in Ukraine, and a rare instance of a conviction for war crimes carried out when Russian forces first crossed into Ukraine more than a decade ago. In 2022, a United Nations-led commission of inquiry concluded that Russian forces had committed widespread atrocities in eastern Ukraine.
Mr. Torden had pleaded not guilty to five counts of committing war crimes, but a panel of three judges unanimously found him guilty of leading the ambush, murder, mutilation and distributing harmful images online. He was acquitted of a charge linked to planning the ambush because of insufficient evidence, the court said in its ruling.
Mr. Torden was a leader of Rusich, a neo-Nazi militia group that fought alongside Russia’s military and is associated with Wagner, the Russian private military company, according to the United States government. He and other members of the militia had been sanctioned by the United States, as well as the European Union and other allied countries.
Rusich mercenaries are known to have fought alongside Russian-backed proxy forces in the Donbas region in 2015 and to have appeared again on the battleground surrounding Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kharkiv in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Mr. Torden was arrested in Helsinki in July 2023, when he tried to enter Finland under a false identity. Mr. Torden was held under Finland’s terrorism laws and later charged with international war crimes. The trial was held in Finland after the country’s Supreme Court rejected an extradition request by Ukrainian prosecutors, citing concerns that he would not receive a fair trial in Ukraine.
During the trial, the court heard how Mr. Torden, as a deputy commander in Rusich, led an ambush at a checkpoint, killing 22 soldiers and wounding five others. The Rusich militia took over the checkpoint, flying a Ukrainian flag, according to the court ruling. After the firefight, Rusich soldiers searched through Ukraine’s injured, and fatally shot at least one of them.
Under Torden’s command, Rusich fighters mutilated the body of a Ukrainian soldier, carving the Rusich symbol into his face. They then photographed the mutilated soldier, and distributed the images on social media, with a message from Mr. Torden saying that Rusich fighters show no mercy.
During the trial, a Ukrainian soldier who was wounded in the attack testified that he saw Mr. Torden during the ambush, recognizing him by his tattoos of ancient Slavic symbols and his weapon of choice, a Russian-manufactured PKM machine gun, according to Finland’s public broadcaster, YLE.
In his defense testimony, Mr. Torden said that he was at the scene with a journalist and participated in filming propaganda videos for the Russian-backed separatist forces. He denied mutilating the wounded soldiers.
Mr. Torden plans to appeal the ruling and sentencing, said his lawyer, Heikki Lampela.
“My client was more than surprised, outright outraged, because there was no evidence that he had killed any wounded persons or given orders to kill wounded persons,” Mr. Lampela said in a telephone interview.
Nataliya Malgina, Mr. Torden’s other lawyer, told Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti that the sentence was “politically motivated.”
Mr. Torden had been expelled from Norway in 2016 as a threat to national security, according to the treasury department. He took over the training of Rusich, replacing its previous leader, Alexey Yurevich Milchakov, who was wounded during fighting in 2022.
