The American Department of Justice for the first time brought charges against Russian military personnel who participated in the invasion of Ukraine under the law on war crimes against US citizens abroad. Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke about this, his statement was published on the department’s website.
The military personnel, according to materials from the federal court in Virginia, are accused of conspiracy to commit war crimes, unlawful imprisonment, torture and inhumane treatment of a US citizen , who has been living in the village of Milovo, Kherson region, since 2021.
Merrick clarified that we are talking about commanders Suren Mkrtchyan and Dmitry Budnik, as well as their subordinates — soldiers named Valery and Nazar.
The case file states that in April 2022, Mkrtchyan, together with two soldiers, kidnapped a man from his house. They stripped him, threw him to the ground, tied his hands behind his back, put a pistol to his head and beat him with feet, hands and rifle butts.
The US citizen was imprisoned in a basement, where he was interrogated under torture: they continued to beat him in the chest and stomach, threatened with execution, took off his clothes and took photographs. One of the military men threatened to rape the man.
Later, the military took the victim outside, where they pushed him to the ground again, put a gun to the back of his head and shot near his head. He was then beaten again and interrogated. In the basement where the man was kept for ten days, there was commander Budnik, who demanded that the American “say his last words.”
“This story should demonstrate that the Department of Justice—and the American people—has a long memory. We will not forget the atrocities in Ukraine,” concluded Merrick Garland.
In September 2022, residents of the Milovsky and Novoaleksandrovsky communities of the Kherson region told the Ukrainian project “Center for Investigative Journalism” that during the occupation Suren Mkrtchyan participated in kidnappings and committed sexualized violence against women. In the Ukrainian “Peacemaker” base, Mkrtchyan appears as the deputy chief of staff of a motorized rifle regiment in the 1st Army Corps of the self-proclaimed DPR.