Friday 10 June 2022 10:28 PM Ukraine offers a glimmer of hope for Brits facing the death penalty as he hints ... trends now
Ukraine yesterday pledged to win freedom for two British soldiers sentenced to death by Russia’s political henchmen.
Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin were captured fighting for Ukraine and face execution by firing squad.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss held urgent talks with her counterpart in Kyiv yesterday amid an international outcry at the sham trial staged by Vladimir Putin’s puppet regime in occupied Donetsk, eastern Ukraine.
The two men’s terrified families were given a glimmer of hope as Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK suggested a prisoner swap would be negotiated.
Vadym Prystaiko told BBC News: ‘It will be a swap. The important question is what will be the price for this.’
Former Cabinet minister Robert Jenrick, who is Mr Aslin’s MP and who condemned the ‘disgusting Soviet-era style show trial’, said he had been assured by the ambassador that the Ukrainians will give ‘absolute priority’ to the Britons in prisoner-swap negotiations.
British fighters Aiden Aslin, 28, (left) and Shaun Pinner, 48, (right) were captured by Russian forces while fighting for Ukraine and put on trial in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic
An ‘appalled’ Boris Johnson ordered ministers to do ‘everything in their power’ to secure the release of Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner
There was an international outcry at the sham trial staged by Vladimir Putin’s puppet regime in occupied Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, which found the men guilty
British citizens Aiden Aslin (L) and Shaun Pinner (R) and Moroccan Saaudun Brahim (C) have all been sentenced to death by firing squad after being accused by local authorities of participating in hostilities on the side of Ukraine as mercenaries
Mr Pinner, a 48-year-old Army veteran from Watford, and Mr Aslin, 28, a former care worker from Newark, Nottinghamshire, both moved to Ukraine in 2018 and joined its army. They served with Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade and were taken prisoner in Mariupol in April.
The United Nations branded their three-day trial as a war crime and a clear breach of their Geneva Convention rights as prisoners of war. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the White House was ‘gravely concerned’, while the German government condemned Russia’s ‘complete disregard for the basic principles of humanitarian international law’.
Mr Pinner’s Ukrainian wife Larysa blasted the ‘absurdity and cynicism of this rotten and false event called a trial’, adding she feared Russia would use the men as propaganda ‘to the fullest – and this circus will go on for a long time’.
‘I still pray that our warriors can endure all of this!’ she wrote on Facebook.
The Kremlin – which calls the shots in the so-called People’s Republic of Donetsk – continued playing political games yesterday by mocking the UK as ‘hysterical’ and telling it to deal directly with the regime in Donetsk, despite it not being recognised by any country except Russia. Moscow’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed the men’s ‘crimes’ had been ‘committed on the
