Two Russian soldiers have been sentenced to life in Russia for murdering an entire family of nine, including two children, in an occupied Ukrainian town in 2023, the state news agency Tass reported Friday.
According to the prosecution, on October 28, 2023, in the partially occupied Ukrainian region of Donetsk, in Volnovakha, Anton Sopov and Stanislav Raou, armed with assault rifles with silencers, decimated the Kapkanets family, including two children aged nine and four years.
They were convicted by a military court in Rostov-on-Don (Rostov na Donou), in the south of Russia, for these assassinations, said Tass, citing security sources, and did not provide further details on the mobile.
The murder of the Kapkanets family sparked immense indignation in Ukraine. “The occupiers killed the Kapkanets family who refused to give up their house and were celebrating a birthday,” human rights ombudsman Dmitro Lubinets said.
After intense bombardments which destroyed a large part of the city, Russian forces seized Volnovakha in the first days of the assault on Ukraine launched on February 24, 2022.
This conviction is a rare example of recognition by Russian institutions of abuses committed by Russian soldiers in the occupied zones, of which Ukrainians, Westerners and international organizations accuse them.
Russian soldiers are notably accused of having committed the massacre of hundreds of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Boutcha, near Kyiv, before withdrawing from the region in the spring of 2022. Moscow has rejected these accusations and denounced Western staging. , despite the numerous testimonies implicating the Russian military.
