A Finnish court found a Russian mercenary guilty on Friday of committing war crimes in Ukraine in 2014, sentencing him to life in prison.
Voislav Torden, a Russian citizen known as Yan Petrovsky, was found guilty on four of five charges related to the ambush, murder, and mutilation of Ukrainian soldiers and distributing denigrating photos of the dead soldiers online. He was acquitted of a charge regarding the planning of the ambush.
It is the first time a Finnish court presided over a case involving an alleged war crime committed during the Russia-Ukraine war. Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 and escalated that conflict in 2022 when it expanded those operations with the intent of conquering the whole country.
Torden was arrested in Helsinki in July 2023, after he tried to enter Finland under a false identity. He was held under the country’s terrorism laws and later charged with international war crimes. Finland declined an extradition request by Ukrainian prosecutors.
He was a leader of a neo-Nazi paramilitary group, Rusich, which fought alongside Russia’s military in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions starting in 2014. During his time as a deputy commander, he led an ambush at a checkpoint that killed 22 Ukrainian soldiers and injured five others in eastern Ukraine, long before Russia’s full-scale invasion. After the firefight, one of the Rusich soldiers shot and killed a wounded Ukrainian soldier and mutilated another.
Torden ordered Rusich fighters to carve their symbol into the face of a Ukrainian soldier.
A surviving soldier was able to identify Torden for the court due to his distinctive tattoos of ancient Slavic symbols and the specific machine gun he was known to carry, according to YLE, Finland’s public broadcaster.
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In defense testimony, Torden claimed he was there with a journalist and aided in the filming of propaganda videos and he denied mutilating wounded soldiers. His lawyer, Heikki Lampela, said they will appeal the court’s ruling.
“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,” Lampela told the New York Times.