Russian court sentences Ukrainian citizen Litvinov to eight and a half years in prison

A Russian court has sentenced Serhiy Litvinov to 8.5 years in a maximum security penal colony for robbery. Ukrainian citizen Litvinov was detained by Russian law enforcement officers as a fighter of the volunteer battalion on suspicion of killing 40 people during the fighting in Donbas. Later, the charges were reclassified due to lack of evidence of guilt.

This was announced by his lawyer Viktor Parshutkin, UNIAN news agency reports.

“Today, the Tarasovski District Court of Rostov region delivered a judgment in the case of Ukrainian citizen Serhiy Litvinov, who was found guilty of committing robbery against Russian citizen Alexander Lysenko. Litvinov was sentenced to 8 years and 6 months’ imprisonment in a maximum security penal colony,” the lawyer said.

As a reminder, first, Russia considered Litvinov to be a volunteer of the Dnipro-1 battalion. The Russian propaganda made him the symbol of the “atrocities” of the Ukrainian servicemen in Donbas.

Later, the case fell apart, so the investigators reclassified it into another article.

Litvinov was tried under Part 3 of Article 162 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (robbery). This article provides for up to 12 years in prison.

According to the investigators, in summer of 2014 he along with two “representatives of the law enforcement agencies of Ukraine committed an armed assault with a Kalashnikov rifle on a Russian citizen” in one of the villages in Luhansk region. The attackers allegedly “stole two cars belonging to the victim and injured him.”