Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) said Wednesday that a Russian soldier captured near the northeastern town of Vovchansk has been sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes.
HUR said the convict, 36-year-old Russian national Sergei Tuzhilov, callsign “Altai,” was taken prisoner in September 2024 during a special operation near the Vovchansk Aggregate Plant.
According to the intelligence agency, Tuzhilov served as an assault rifleman with Russia’s 69th Motorized Rifle Division of the Leningrad Military District. Before being mobilized, he had served two prison terms in Russia for serious criminal offenses.
A Ukrainian court found that in June 2024, during fighting for the Vovchansk Aggregate Plant, Tuzhilov and an accomplice shot and killed three Ukrainian servicemen who had been taken prisoner. One of the captives, whose hands were bound, was personally executed by Tuzhilov with a gunshot to the back of the head, the court ruled.
These actions violate the Geneva Conventions and are classified as serious international crimes.
Investigators said Tuzhilov also selected execution sites for two other prisoners of war and guarded the perimeter while the killings were carried out.
Ukrainian intelligence said accountability was made possible after a complex operation to retake the plant, in which multiple intelligence special units fought through all 30 buildings of the facility amid heavy Russian artillery fire, guided bombs, kamikaze drones and flamethrower systems.
Tuzhilov was the only surviving member of his unit and was handed over to Ukrainian justice, the agency said, adding that “every war crime committed against the Ukrainian people will be met with just retribution.”
Last year in an intercepted call, Russian servicemembers are heard discussing the execution of a Ukrainian prisoner of war, inadvertently documenting a war crime, reports Ukraine’s defense intelligence.
According to HUR, the commander of a unit within the 60th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 5th Army of the Russian Armed Forces gives the criminal order to kill a Ukrainian Defense Forces captive.
“They also took a captured Ukrop [derogatory term used by Russians to mock Ukrainians] with them, as far as I understood,” a Russian soldier says in the intercepted call published on Jan. 6.
“Talk to this Ukrop personally and erase him,” the Russian soldier adds.
HUR indicates that the recording serves as further evidence of the systematic violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Armed Forces.
Kyiv Post reported that Russian officers are instructing their soldiers positioned closer to the front line to shoot and torture the local population.
Ukrainian forces found the phone of one of the Russian soldiers, who filmed his comrade, Oleg Igorevych Rudakov (“Rudik”), giving criminal orders to “clean up” residents.
“Whoever hears me, this is an order: clean out the residents, cleanse them out,” he says in an intercepted conversation.
In June last year HUR eliminated Mykhailo Hrytsay, a high-ranking collaborator and war criminal in the Russian-occupied city of Berdyansk, Zaporizhzhia region.
Sources within the intelligence agency told Kyiv Post that Hrytsay was shot on June 18, in a special HUR operation. According to the source, he was killed with a Makarov PM pistol equipped with a “silencer” – more accurately a suppressor.
Hrytsay, originally from Ukraine’s Poltava region, was active in Ukraine’s public and political life before defecting to the Russian occupation administration.
He had repeatedly run for parliament, served as an assistant to a people’s deputy, and recently headed the Berdyansk city organization of the Socialist Ukraine party.
As the so-called “deputy mayor for infrastructure, housing and utilities, and the fuel and energy complex” in the Russian-installed administration, Hrytsay was responsible for organizing repression against residents and establishing torture chambers used against Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs).
He was also involved in the appropriation of municipal and state property in Berdyansk.
On April 1, 2022, Hrytsay was officially charged in absentia with high treason under Part 2 of Article 111 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
“We still have plenty of such enemy accomplices in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. We will come for each of them and stop their criminal activities – with a silencer or without, quietly or loudly, but always effectively,” the HUR source told Kyiv Post.