A Russian court has sentenced two Russian soldiers to life in prison for killing a family of nine in occupied Ukraine, in a rare example of the country holding its troops to account for alleged war crimes.
The entire Kapkanets family were killed in their home in the Donetsk region in October last year by Anton Sopov, 21, and Stanislav Rau, 28, prosecutors said. Among the victims were two children aged five and nine.
The family had been celebrating a birthday at the time, Ukraine’s ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said a day after the killings.
Some details of the case are unclear, such as whether the soldiers pleaded guilty, as the trial was held behind closed doors due to military secrecy, Russian media reported.
Sopov and Rau were convicted of killing 53-year-old Eduard Kapkanets, his wife Tatiana, their adult sons with their wives, a nine-year-old granddaughter, a four-year-old grandson and a more distant relative of the family.
Ukrainian officials at the time said they believed the family was murdered for refusing to give up their house to the Russian troops.
State news agency Tass reported that the men had been convicted for murder “motivated by political, ideological, racial, national or religious hatred”.
The Ukrainian city of Volnovakha was captured by Russian forces just weeks after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Most of the town has been destroyed.
Russia denies all allegations of war crimes in Ukraine, despite well document evidence to the contrary.
This includes the bombing of a theatre in Mariupol which had been sheltering hundreds of people in March 2022 and the killing of hundreds of people in the town of Bucha that month.
Russian forces are also accused of running a network of torture chambers across occupied Ukraine, where civilians and prisoners of war are tortured and in some cases killed.
The UN has accused Russian forces in Ukraine of rapes, “widespread” torture and killings and the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for Vladimir Putin’s arrest.
