Perhaps this is the hardest day, even harder than when the sentence will come, for Vadim Shishimarin, the 21-year-old Russian sergeant accused of war crimes and the premeditated murder of an unarmed civilian in a village of Sumy on February 28. Before the judges of the Kiev court he stood up for the deposition, he spoke in Russian trying to appear calm. Even when the prosecution asked for a life sentence for him. But Kateryna Shelipova, widow of the man Shishimarin admitted he killed with an AK-47 aiming at her head, took courage and stood up, looking him straight in her eyes. She asked him what she felt when she murdered her husband Oleksandr, 62, who drove a tractor for work. If he had repented of his crime of hers.
“I know you won’t be able to forgive me, but I ask your forgiveness anyway,” the child soldier replied. Kateryna wanted to ask him some more questions: «Tell me please, why did you come here? To protect us? ”She said, recalling Vladimir Putin’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine. “You came to protect us from whom? Did you protect me from my husband whom you killed? ‘ Shishimarin remained silent. What could he have told him. But some other sentence to her excuse she wanted to pronounce, true or false: “At first I refused to shoot, I didn’t want to, but I was ordered, I was threatened by another soldier”.
Inside the glass and metal box, Vadim appeared even more haggard, closed in his fear. He tried not to show feelings. Not even when Katerina said that she heard the shots that day while she was in the house, she immediately went out and through the gate she saw that soldier who still had the weapon in his hand. Soon after, she found Oleksandr on the ground in the street, dead. “The loss of my husband is everything to me,” she told the judges, “it was he who protected me.” Then she sat in her chair in that crowded courtroom with reporters, all eyes on her and the accused, her face flushed, a black headband and her lips tightened to say nothing more. Shishimarin’s public attorney, Volodymyr Ovsyannikov, said he will raise the question of whether the prisoner of war called to testify is giving his testimony of his will to her.
The next witness will be another Russian soldier who was in the car stolen by the defendant and three other fellow soldiers when things got bad after four days of battle. According to the reconstruction of the Kiev prosecutor’s office, Shishimarin and the others managed to arrive in the village of Chupakhivkai with the newly confiscated car, along the way they met a man who was returning home by bicycle and talking on his cell phone. The commander ordered to kill him to prevent him from reporting them to the Ukrainian military. Vadim shot him. The Kremlin has declared that it has no information on the case and of course there is no trace on the Russian media of the process that is making the rounds of all the media in the world.