The UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has raised the case of two Britons sentenced to death for fighting against Russian forces in a phone call with her Ukrainian counterpart.
Aiden Aslin (28) and Shaun Pinner (48) have been convicted of taking action towards violent seizure of power at a court in the self-proclaimed republic in Donetsk.
Ms Truss said she had called the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, on Friday to “discuss efforts to secure the release of prisoners of war held by Russian proxies”.
No 10 has said the men are entitled to combatant immunity as prisoners of war.
Downing Street has also said that while Boris Johnson was “appalled” at the sentences, there were no plans for direct interventions with Russia, with the emphasis being on their status as members of Ukrainian forces.
“The judgment against them is an egregious breach of the Geneva convention,” Ms Truss said. “The UK continues to back Ukraine against Putin’s barbaric invasion.”
An adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister said on Friday that Russia had the men sentenced to death in order to gain leverage in its negotiations with Ukraine and its western allies.
“The trial of the foreigners raises the stakes in the Russian Federation’s negotiation process. They are using them as hostages to put pressure on the world over the negotiation process,” Vadym Denysenko said.
He said Ukraine would coordinate its position on the sentences with Britain, the US and the EU. Ukraine has already sentenced several Russian soldiers to long prison terms for war crimes and Russia may seek to trade the prisoners to get them back.
Russia has claimed it had no influence on the proceedings, which took place in a Russian-occupied territory in east Ukraine. “I’d rather not hinder the operation of the judiciary and law enforcement authorities of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” said the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, referring to the proxy government.
The MPs who represent the two men as constituents, Robert Jenrick, the MP for Newark, and Richard Fuller, the MP for North East Bedfordshire, have called for Russian officials to be summoned to answer for their proxies’ actions in the Ukrainian region.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, Mr Jenrick said: “I’ve urged the foreign secretary to raise this immediately at the highest levels with the Russian government. The UK needs to be clear you can’t treat British nationals in this way. This really is the most egregious breach of international law.”
He added: “Aiden and Shaun are not mercenaries, they are combatants, who are prisoners of war now and should be treated in accordance with the Geneva conventions, and the Geneva convention is being breached in the most egregious manner by Russia in holding this kangaroo court and now this sentence to death.”
Mr Jenrick said the men were being “hooked out and used in a Soviet-era show trial as a way of taking hostages or taking revenge against the UK”.
He said a prisoner exchange could be a solution but that required Russia to “play ball, take this issue seriously and start living up to their international obligations”.
Mr Fuller said the men needed access to healthcare and legal advice. He said it was fair to argue they had exposed themselves to risk, but added: “What’s at the centre of this is the recognition by the Russian authorities and their proxies in this region that Shaun and Aiden were members of the Ukrainian military, they are prisoners of war, and that the Geneva convention applies. There appears to be no recognition of that.”
On Friday morning the school standards minister, Robin Walker, said the government would use all diplomatic channels to raise the case. He told Sky News: “We utterly condemn the approach that’s been taken here and we will use every method at our disposal to take this issue up.”
A Moroccan national, Saaudun Brahim, was convicted alongside Aslin and Pinner. The men were accused of being mercenaries after fighting with Ukrainian troops.
The Russian news agency Interfax claimed the men would be able to appeal against their convictions. The Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has described the British reaction to the sentences against the men as “hysterical” and said a UK appeal should be directed at the self-proclaimed Donetsk republic, a Russian-occupied territory internationally recognised as part of Ukraine.
Mr Aslin is originally from Newark-on-Trent in Nottinghamshire, and Mr Pinner is from Watford, but his mother lives in Fuller’s constituency. They were both members of regular Ukrainian military units fighting in Mariupol, the southern port city that has been the scene of some of the heaviest fighting since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Concerns were also raised in Ukraine about the status of Andrew Hill (35) who was captured in fighting in southern Ukraine. Unlike the other two Britons, Hill is a member of the International Legion, the group of several thousand volunteer soldiers who have agreed to fight as part of Ukraine’s army during the war.
A spokesperson for the Legion said they were worried about Mr Hill’s welfare, who local reports had suggested was also going to be put on trial alongside Mr Aslin and Mr Pinner. “Then the trial came and went and it turned out that Andrew Hill was not among those sentences, which raises the question of what has happened to him. What’s his status? Is he even alive?”.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s deputy head of military intelligence said Ukraine is losing against Russia on the front lines and is now almost solely reliant on weapons from the West to keep Russia at bay.
“This is an artillery war now,” said Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence. The front lines were now where the future would be decided, he told the Guardian, “and we are losing in terms of artillery”.
“Everything now depends on what [the West] gives us,” said Mr Skibitsky. “Ukraine has one artillery piece to 10 to 15 Russian artillery pieces. Our Western partners have given us about 10 per cent of what they have.”
Ukraine is using 5,000 to 6,000 artillery rounds a day, according to Mr Skibitsky. “We have almost used up all of our [artillery] ammunition and are now using 155-calibre Nato standard shells,” he said of the ammunition that is fired from artillery pieces.
“Europe is also delivering lower-calibre shells but as Europe runs out, the amount is getting smaller.”
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said last week between 60 and 100 Ukrainian soldiers were dying each day and a further 500 were being injured. Ukraine has kept the total number of its military losses secret.
Soldiers speaking to the Guardian from Ukraine’s front lines this week painted a similar picture.
Mr Skibitsky stressed the need for the West to supply Ukraine with long-range rocket systems to destroy the Russian artillery pieces from afar. This week, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych told the Guardian that Ukraine needed 60 multiple-rocket launchers – many more than the handful promised so far by the UK and US – to have a chance of defeating Russia.
Ukraine is set to ask the West for a list of weapons and defensive equipment at the contact group meeting Nato in Brussels on June 15th.
Mr Skibitsky thinks the conflict will remain predominantly an artillery war in the near future and the number of rocket attacks – which can be launched from Russia and have hit civilians – will remain at their current rate.
In the first month, Russia was constantly striking Ukraine with rockets, but in the last two months this bombardment has slowed. Recent figures published by the head of Ukraine’s armed forces assert that Russia launches between 10 and 14 a day.
Rockets are expensive to manufacture. Each rocket can cost anywhere between a few hundred thousand dollars to several million.
“We have noticed that Russia is carrying out far fewer rocket attacks and it has used H-22 rockets; they are old 1970s Soviet rockets,” said Skibitsky. “This shows that Russia is running low on rockets.”
Mr Skibitsky said Russia was unable to produce rockets quickly because of the sanctions and that it had used around 60 per cent of its supplies.
The sound of sirens has become a daily feature for Ukrainians. According to Mr Skibitsky, each siren signals a rocket has entered Ukrainian airspace but its impact is not always reported for security reasons.
“The rockets take anywhere from 40 to 90 minutes to impact, depending on where they are launched from . . . we don’t know where they are going to land,” he said. Mr Skibitsky noted Russia was currently using long-range bombers that can reach anywhere in Ukraine without leaving Russian airspace.
In terms of the three front lines, Mr Skibitsky said most of Russia’s forces were now concentrated in the Donbas region and seeking to occupy the administrative borders of both the Donetsk and Luhansk republics. This was the area, he said, where the artillery battles were the heaviest.
In northeast Ukraine, around Kharkiv, he said Russian forces were focusing on defence after Ukraine’s counteroffensive pushed them out of several towns and villages in the region in May.
“The threat to Kharkiv has lessened,” said Mr Skibitsky, of Ukraine’s second-biggest city, which has been shelled regularly since the beginning of the war.
Lastly, in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, two southern Ukrainian regions that Russia almost completely occupies, Russian forces were digging in for the long haul, said Mr Skibitsky. He claimed Russian forces are building double, sometimes triple, lines of defence.
“It will now be harder to get that territory back,” said Mr Skibitsky. “And that’s why we need to weapons.”
“If they succeed in the Donbas, they could use these territories to launch another attack on Odesa, [the city of] Zaporizhzhia [and] Dnipro,” said Skibitsky of big cities under Ukrainian control which are close to the southern Russian-occupied areas. “Their aim is the whole of Ukraine and more.”
Ukraine’s military intelligence believes that Russia can continue at its current rate without manufacturing more weapons or mobilising the population for another year.
Mr Skibitsky does not exclude the possibility that Russia will freeze the war for a period of time to convince the West to lift sanctions. “But then they will start it again – look at the last eight years,” he added. — Guardian