Two Britons and a Moroccan captured fighting alongside Ukrainian forces having been sentenced to death by the Russia-backed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).
27-year-old Aiden Aslin and 48-year-old Shaun Pinner, said to have been captured in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol in April over the course of its long siege by Russian forces, were sentenced to death for, as Russian state media puts it, “violently attempting to overthrow the government of the Donetsk People’s Republic”, as was Moroccan national Saadun Brahim.
Britain’s left-wing Guardian newspaper reports that, more specifically, they were convicted of being mercenaries and “terrorism, committing a crime as part of a criminal group, and forcible seizure of power or forcible retention of power” — charges they pled guilty to in what is unlikely to have been a fair trial lasting only a few days.
BREAKING: British mercenaries Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner just received the death penalty for violently attempting to overthrow the government of the Donetsk People's Republic—as did Moroccan Saadun Brahimhttps://t.co/sTjRGRZ9W9 pic.twitter.com/uI4Gt2MFLT
— Wyatt Reed (@wyattreed13) June 9, 2022
“The Russian authorities have chosen to make an example out of these two British nationals and it is, I think, completely shameful,” commented Robert Jenrick MP, a Conservative Party politician who represents Aslin’s home constituency in Parliament, declining to draw a distinction between Russia and the DPR, generally regarded by Western governments as a puppet regime.
Jenrick expressed hope that the Britons’ freedom could be secured via a prisoner transfer “in the near future” — something Aslin and Pinner themselves requested in recordings released by their captors in April.
The episode may see Jenrick’s party colleague Liz Truss, the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Affairs in the Boris Johnson administration, come in for criticism, given she controversially endorsed Britons travelling to Ukraine to fight the Russians on television in February.
“The people of Ukraine are fighting for freedom and democracy, not just for Ukraine but for the whole of Europe because that is what President Putin is challenging,” the Foreign Secretary told the BBC during an interview on the then-recent invasion.
“And absolutely, if people want to support that struggle, I would support them in doing that,” she added.
Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s official residence, had to shoot this down fairly quickly, emphasising that travel to Ukraine was not advised — not least because Truss’s own departmental website warned citizens that “travel to eastern Ukraine to fight, or to assist others engaged in the conflict… may amount to offences against UK terrorism or other legislation and you could be prosecuted on your return to the UK.”
Unfortunately for Johnson, the laws were not "very clear" to his foreign secretary, Liz Truss MP… https://t.co/dvJGguiTQ8
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 11, 2022
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