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Ukraine court sentences Russia soldiers to 14-years in prison

Monday, 18 April 2016 5:15 PM [ Last Update: Monday, 18 April 2016 5:14 PM ]

Russian sergeant Aleksander Aleksandrov (R) and captain Yevgeny Yerofeyev are pictured sitting in a glass cage during a court hearing in Kiev on April 15, 2016. (AFP photo)

A court in Ukraine has sentenced two Russian soldiers, captured in 2015, to 14 years in prison for crimes, including fighting in the conflict in the country’s troubled east.

The Ukrainian court made the ruling on Monday, after it found Sergeant Aleksander Aleksandrov and Captain Yevgeny Yerofeyev guilty of participating in "an aggressive war" against Ukraine and committing "a terrorist attack" in the country’s east.

Kiev says the two were servicemen with an elite Russian military intelligence unit when they were arrested in the eastern region of Lugansk last May.

Russia, however, insists that the pair had resigned from active duty and crossed into the war zone of their own free will.

Russia’s Interfax news agency, citing the convicts’ lawyers, said Aleksandrov and Yerofeyev have yet to decide whether to file an appeal against the verdict.

Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko has proposed swapping the soldiers for a Ukrainian pilot who was sentenced to 22 years in prison by a Russian court in March.

Ukrainian military pilot Nadiya Savchenko sits inside a defendant's cage during her sentencing hearing at a court in the southwestern Russian town of Donetsk, on March 22, 2016. (AFP photo)

Nadiya Savchenko, arrested in 2014, is accused of alleged involvement in the killing of two Moscow reporters in eastern Ukraine; a charge she has denied.

Relations between Moscow and Kiev strained after the Crimean Peninsula rejoined Russia in a referendum in March 2014. The ties went in tatters after Kiev started a military crackdown on pro-Russian forces fighting for greater autonomy in the two mainly Russian-speaking regions of Lugansk and Donetsk in the east of the country.

According to the United Nations, over 9,000 people have lost their lives and some 20,000 have been injured in the conflict since April 2014.

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