Long sentences handed to members of Ukraine’s Azov Brigade for defence of Mariupol

A court in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don has sentenced 23 former members of Ukraine’s Azov Brigade to long prison sentences for attempting to seize power by force, participation in the activities of a terrorist organisation and undergoing terror training, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Wednesday.

Twelve of the defendants were given between 13 and 23 years in a high-security penal colony, while 11 others were given similarly long custodial sentences in absentia, having already been returned to Ukraine as part of a prisoner swap.

The case against a 24th defendant, Oleksandr Ishchenko, who died in Russian custody in July, was dropped.

While some of the defendants, all of whom served in either military and auxiliary roles for the Azov Brigade, were captured during the siege of Mariupol in 2022, where members of the brigade were among the last holdouts at the city’s Azovstal plant as Russian forces closed in on the city, many others were arrested at home after being demobilised or while attempting to leave Mariupol, according to Mediazona.

Many of the defendants complained of being tortured, bullied and forced to endure terrible conditions while being held in pretrial detention. “I witnessed bags over heads, wires attached to limbs, broken ribs, ... people beaten to death, hunger ..., a lack of medical care, ... lice, bed bugs. We had two showers in the entire year we were there. We left dirtier than we were when we arrived, and beaten up as well,” one defendant told the court in their closing statement.

The Azov Brigade, a detachment of Ukraine’s National Guard that has played an active role in repelling Russian attacks on eastern Ukraine since its inception in 2014, was declared a terror organisation by Russia’s Supreme Court in 2022, and its perceived association with ultranationalism and neo-Nazi ideology has been the focus of relentless Russian propaganda aimed at discrediting the formation.