Court of Appeal sentences Voislav Torden to 12.5 years for war crimes

Finland’s Helsinki Court of Appeal has sentenced Russian national Voislav Torden to 12 and a half years in prison for three war crimes, Yle reported on Monday.

The court rejected the charge that Torden was personally or as a commander responsible for the shooting of wounded Ukrainian soldiers. It said there was insufficient evidence that he had shot them himself or that two other members of the Rusich group had done so.

However, the court found that Torden had fired a light machine gun at Ukrainian soldiers during an ambush carried out while misusing a foreign state’s flag. It ruled that this conduct constituted a war crime.

The Helsinki District Court sentenced Torden to life imprisonment last March for four war crimes committed in Ukraine in 2014. The district court considered the killing of a Ukrainian soldier the most serious offence.

Torden appealed, seeking to have the charges dismissed or his sentence reduced. He has consistently denied committing war crimes or serving as deputy commander of the Rusich paramilitary group.

The case concerns an attack on a checkpoint in the Luhansk region on September 5, 2014. Torden was known at the time as Jan Petrovski. He has said that his role was to make propaganda and recruitment videos with a television journalist, rather than take part in combat.

The trial was held in Finland because Torden was arrested there in August 2023.