His case caught the world‘s attention because Siberian Vadim Shishimarin was the first soldier to be tried since Russia invaded Ukraine.
In his early twenties, the young man admitted that he was the perpetrator of a cold-blooded murder that involved a 62-year-old man who was riding a bicycle in the village of Chupakhivka, in the Sumy region, in the north of Ukraine: he was unarmed, but he was making a phone call. That was enough for the soldier to pull the trigger and cool him with a single shot, in the middle of the road.
Russian soldier Vadim Shishimarin on trial: “I plead guilty to war crimes”
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A war crime that Moscow had dismissed as an accident and a staging.
With shaved head, low eyes. The boy originally from Irkutsk, Siberia, was in command of Unit 32010, Fourth Tank Division. But during the trial he had testified that he had simply carried out an order from above: “They gave me the order to shoot and I couldn’t refuse. I shot out the window with my Kalashnikov. The man has fallen ». A story of the stories of inhumanity and war that have seen the number of civilians killed since the beginning of the conflict rise to tens of thousands.
In the end, the court in the first instance decided to give the young soldier the maximum sentence. However, the sentence was immediately contested by public opinion, defining it too heavy not only for the soldier’s young age, but also because during the trial Vadim Shishimarin admitted his faults and was very sorry for carrying out the order without taking into account the circumstances.
That is until today, when the Kiev Court of Appeal reduced the sentence of the Russian soldier to 15 years. Defense attorney Viktor Ovsyannikov appealed to the court to reduce the sentence to 10 years. The lawyer said Shishimarin could most likely return to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange.