A court in the Finnish capital Helsinki has sentenced a Russian neo-Nazi to life in prison for committing war crimes in Ukraine, Finland’s public broadcaster Yle reported on Friday.
Yan Petrovsky, who goes by the nom de guerre Voislav Torden, was formerly a commander of Rusich, a Russian neo-Nazi paramilitary organisation engaged in sabotage and assault reconnaissance. He was charged with five counts of committing war crimes while fighting with Russian separatists in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of eastern Ukraine in 2014.
According to prosecutors, Petrovsky and members of his group convinced a convoy of Ukrainian soldiers into coming to a halt, then fired on the convoy and struck it with a missile. In total, 22 Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) servicemen were killed in the attack.
During the trial, the prosecution submitted video evidence of the atrocity that had been filmed and posted online by Rusich members, though Petrovsky denied having any involvement with the ambush himself.
From 2014 to 2015, Rusich militants led by Petrovsky and Alexey Milchakov, a notorious neo-Nazi famed for his brutality, fought in Russia’s hybrid war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, returning to take up arms again following Russia’s full-scale invasion.
In 2022, independent news outlet Meduza uncovered evidence that the neo-Nazi group had embezzled donations made to the Ukrainian charity Happy New Life, which was set up to provide support to the AFU and Ukrainian refugees.
After various inconsistencies between his Finnish residence permit and Russian passport raised the suspicions of immigration officers, Petrovsky was detained at Helsinki Airport in July 2023 and placed in a temporary accommodation centre. When a Ukrainian request for his extradition was ultimately turned down by Helsinki on the grounds that Petrovsky could not be guaranteed a fair trial, Finnish prosecutors ultimately decided to put him on trial in Finland instead.