US accuses four Russian soldiers of war crimes against an American

The Justice Department said Wednesday it has charged four Russian soldiers with torturing an American living in Ukraine’s war-torn Kherson region, applying a war crimes statute for the first time since it was introduced nearly three decades ago.

The indictment, which was unsealed in Virginia, could be followed by other charges against Russians who are alleged to have committed “atrocities on the largest scale in any European armed conflict since World War II,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said at the announcement of the prosecution.

For the first time, Mr. Garland also acknowledged that the department had begun a formal investigation into the “murder of more than 30 Americans” by Hamas fighters during the October 7 attack in Israel, under the same war crimes law used against the Hamas fighters. Russian soldiers.

The victim in the Ukraine case, who was not identified in court filings, said he was kidnapped from his home in Mylove, a village in southern Ukraine, in April 2022, despite telling Russian forces he entered territory that he was not a fighter and that he was not a fighter. has been living in the countryside with his wife since 2021.

During the approximately ten days the victim was in captivity, the soldiers brutally beat him with their fists and the butts of their guns and threatened to sexually assault him. According to prosecutors, in one harrowing episode they dragged him from the building where he was being held captive to carry out a mock execution — which ended when a bullet was fired inches from his temple as he knelt on the ground.

The two commanders, identified as Suren Seiranovich Mkrtchyan and Dmitry Budnik, along with two subordinates identified only by their first names, now live in Russia. The prospects that they would soon travel abroad, where they could be captured, are slim, officials said.

But the prosecutions are part of a broader effort by the Justice Department, FBI and Department of Homeland Security to hold Russian military officials and proxy forces accountable for brutal acts committed against the relative handful of Americans living, fighting in Ukraine or works.

“The rule of law is the best answer we have to crimes that can’t really be answered,” Garland said.

To coordinate those efforts, Mr. Garland in June appointed Eli Rosenbaum, a veteran prosecutor, to oversee the Justice Department’s war crimes accountability efforts. Mr. Rosenbaum is best known for his dogged pursuit of Nazi war criminals and the unmasking in the 1980s of the role that former United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim played in the mass killings of civilians during World War II.

The department’s initial efforts to investigate possible war crimes were hampered by the uncertain situation during the early stages of the war, when the department’s presence was limited to a single official working from the embassy in Kiev. But the number of U.S. investigators, including FBI agents, has steadily increased, and U.S. investigators have worked closely with Ukraine’s National Police and other law enforcement agencies.