You're reading: Conviction of Ukraine’s army general causes backlash among military

In late March, a high-ranking Ukrainian army general was found guilty of negligence that led to the deaths of 49 soldiers.

An unprecedented decision in the country’s history, it has divided the society into those who welcome it as the end of the generals’ impunity and those who think it is a dangerous precedent that will weaken the army.

On March 27, the Pavlograd district court found General Viktor Nazarov guilty of the death of 49 Ukrainian servicemen who were in a plane downed by Kremlin-backed separatists in the sky over Luhansk on June 14, 2014, during the first three months of Russia’s war. Nazarov sent the plane into Luhansk despite intelligence warnings against it. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

During the three years of war in eastern Ukraine, hundreds of lower-ranking Ukrainian soldiers were sentenced by civilian courts for various crimes – from looting to murders and sexual assault. But now that a high-ranking general was imprisoned, many say the military needs a special court.

The deadly attack 

Late on June 13, 2014, just two months after the Russian-backed separatists started the war in eastern Ukraine, three Il-76 military airlifts were set from Dnipro to the Luhansk airport with manpower, ammo, and hardware to reinforce Ukraine’s paratroopers that had been defending the location from the separatists. Since June 9, the stronghold in the airport was eventually surrounded by militants, but Ukrainian fighters continued holding them down.

Having approached the Luhansk airstrip, the first of the three planes took down unharmed. But 10 minutes later, when the second one was about to start landing, two flashing rockets went up in the air hitting the plane’s wing.

At 12:51 a.m. local time, the downed Il-76MD carrying 40 fighters of Ukraine’s 25th Airborne Brigade and a crew of nine people crashed in a field some 7-8 kilometers from the embattled airport. No one of those on board survived.

The third plane requested wave off and evacuated from the area.

Back then, the death of 49 paratroopers and pilots in the sky of Luhansk was Ukraine’s biggest loss ever, and triggered national outrage. When the news reached Kyiv, an angry crowd temporarily seized and and vandalized part of Russia’s Embassy.

On June 15, 2014, the next day after the plane crash, militant warlord Valeriy Bolotov of the separatist group calling itself “Luhansk People’s Republic” assumed responsibility for the attack. After three days of parleys, militants agreed to let Ukrainian military evacuate bodies of the dead.

After the crash, Luhansk airport defenders were being supplied via cargo airdrops – not a single plane was sent to land at the surrounded airport while Ukrainian forces stayed there until Sept. 1, 2014.

Amid public uproar over the tragedy, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, Military Prosecutor General and the Verkhovna Rada launched a high-profile investigation.

Seeking truth

During months of inquiry, the investigation questioned 132 witnesses and performed 122 expert examinations.

As follows from the trial papers, the plane was shot down with the 9M39 rocket fired from the Russian man-portable anti-aircraft system ”Igla,” not operated for service by Ukraine’s armed forces but widely used by Kremlin-sponsored militants against Ukrainian aviation in 2014.

“After the first plane took down safe, the way the next one would be landing became clear. The shooters made use of that observation and pulled the trigger,” Olexander Chornovolenko, chairman of the parliament investigation commission commented on the case.

Soon after the crash, Ukrainian combat units reached out an alleged shooting location near the surrounded airport unveiling two used “Igla” tubes and another one failed missile. Two rockets were effectively shot by Russian-backed militants, of which the second one downed Ukrainian Il-76.

The trial contents show that after shooting rockets at the plane, the militants also started blasting it down with heavy machine gun charged with incendiary bullets. The pilots had no chance to save themselves and soldiers.

But apart from the militants’ role in the tragedy, the investigation also aimed to find out if the Ukrainian commanders could foresee and prevent the accident. For this purpose, the prosecutor office created an expert group of highly-experienced military aviation specialists and pilots.

Negligence

The group’s legal inquiry eventually led the investigation to major general Viktor Nazarov, who was a deputy commander-in-charge of the so-called “anti-terrorist operation,” a name Ukraine’s government uses to describe the armed conflict with the Russian-separatist forces in the country’s east. Nazarov was the right-hand man to the chief of general staff Viktor Muzhenko.

It was Nazarov who gave an ultimate order to send the planes with paratroopers on that day.

On Nov. 18, 2014, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office arrested Nazarov as a suspect. However, he was released on bail of Hr 365,000 ($18,500) under a Kyiv Pechersk court decision a week later.

According to the trial papers, during the preparation of the aerial deployment to Luhansk airport on June 13, 2014, at least three separate surveillance sources warned Nazarov about two militant groups that had been given anti-air man-portable systems and were hunting for any aircraft approaching surrounded Ukrainians in the Luhansk airport.

Nevertheless, the general neglected the intelligence warnings and did not take measures on eliminating or effective suppressing the enemy’s anti-air defense, as required by Ukraine’s military manuals. For ensuring air supplies protection against hostile anti-air man-portable missiles, Ukrainian military doctrines recommend gaining full control over an area with the radius of at least 5-10 kilometers.

But for the outnumbered defenders of Luhansk airport, it was impossible to push the enemy back for that long.

So three non-combat planes carrying paratroopers were ordered to go unprotected through the combat area under hostile control. Moreover, the pilots were not warned of the possible threat and were not given the infrared countermeasure devices that could help confuse the attackers and save the plane.

A group of Ukraine’s top military aviation and legal inquiry experts univocally confirmed the general’s guilt.

On March 27, almost three years after the attack, the Pavlograd court in Dnipro Oblast found Nazarov guilty of negligence of military duty that caused deaths of 49 servicemen.

The wives and parents of the killed paratroopers and pilots sitting in the courtroom with portraits of their lost loved ones hailed the sentence by shouting “Victory!”.

However, the court did not strip Nazarov of his rank. The wives and parents of the killed received compensation of Hr 500,000 ($18,500) from the Defense Ministry.

The general himself has never admitted his guilt and promised to appeal the judgment within 30 days. For this period, he was released on bail again – this time he posted Hr 97,000 ($3,600).

‘Dangerous precedent’

Although the sentence was hailed by relatives of the killed paratroopers, many of Ukraine’s high-profile military officials, civilian volunteers and politicians openly disagreed with the trial’s outcome.

“In the same way like our colleague major general Viktor Nazarov, any commander whose unit suffered combat casualties can be convicted,” Ukraine’s north operative command officers noted in their open letter to the people of Ukraine. “Judging commanders for serving their duties on defending motherland is the same as fighting on the enemy’s side.”

In their opinion, the sentence to Nazarov undermines the morale of the army and hog-ties its command in making risky yet necessary decisions.

“Who of the officers from a platoon commander to the chief of General Staff would now be willing to assume responsibility and defend the country, give orders, make decisions?” a civilian volunteer and popular blogger Oleksiy Mochanov wrote on Facebook. “What if they are erratic and the enemy will take over for this particular time?”

“Ukraine, which is at war for the third year, creates a dangerous precedent that can be fatal for the state,” Chief of the General Staff Muzhenko, Nazarov’s former immediate commander, argued in a Facebook post on March 27. “Bravo, the aggressor is applauding… The commanders at all levels are faced with a question: Is a country worth defending if its judicial system can interpret all your decisions and measures as crimes?”

Muzhenko stood with Nazarov from the very beginning of the investigation. While being questioned on the case, he claimed that the intelligence data from the war zone contains 90 percent of the unreliable and contradicting information that was not obliging Nazarov to cancel the air bridge to Luhansk, even despite confirmed anti-aircraft threat.

Many of Ukrainian military argue that sentencing a general for making decisions also compromises Ukraine’s officership amid ongoing conflict with Russia and reforming the country’s armed forces.

However, others perceived the sentence as the huge victory on the path of dismantling old Soviet army traditions of impunity of generals.

“General Nazarov was convicted not for engaging soldiers to fight but for sending them to slaughter,” a journalist and state defense advisor Yuriy Butusov wrote on his blog. “The court convicted a stupid habit of the commanders like Nazarov to sit in a cabinet hundreds of kilometers from the battle zone and take despot decisions out of touch with the actual situation.”

The precedent paves the way for investigation of Ukraine’s top military commanders, including Muzhenko, in bloodbath battles of Illovaisk, Debaltseve, the Donetsk airport defense, where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers were killed.

Military courts

The loudest aftermath of the sentence was Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko practically taking Nazarov’s side, noting his discontent on the fact that a civilian court judged a “battlefield general.”

“It is the enemy backstabbing our country who bears a real guilt of death of our heroes,” Poroshenko said after the sentence was announced. “In the past three years, we have brought up a new generation of initiative, brave and sometimes frantic commanders ensuring the defense of our Ukraine. To hog-tie them by court decisions would be unwise in terms of ensuring defense capability and security”.

In the opinion of many Nazarov supporters, the Pavlograd district court had no competence in trade of war and military commanding to assess the general’s actions on the case.

However, the court based its decision on the inquiry made by military prosecutors, Defense Ministry officials, military aviation tactics experts, the State Security Service and military intelligence witnesses.

In other words, the court only confirmed the legality of military expert inquiry confirming the general’s fault and assessed penalty.

Nevertheless, Poroshenko now says that he plans to restart the competence of special military courts, an institution that had been abolished in 2010 by the ousted ex-President Viktor Yanukovych under his infamous judicial reform.

“Commanders in combat must be judged by military specialists, military experts, and military judges, not civilians,” Poroshenko said.

Later, during March 31 meeting with military the president noted that the judges must have an appropriate competence in the art of war to rule in cases against generals.

Poroshenko’s backing of Nazarov shocked some of the killed soldiers’ relatives. Ilyana Gaiduk, a sister of the 25th Airborne Brigade paratrooper Ilya Gaiduk, who died in the 2014 attack, decided to return The Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky that Poroshenko awarded to her brother posthumously.

“Soon after the IL-76 crash, you decorated General Nazarov with the same Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky for courage that you gave to our guys posthumously, without specifying where was the courage – in the 49 killed soldiers or in the destroyed military plane?” Gaiduk wrote on Facebook on March 29.

Others were disgruntled about the fact that the sentenced general never apologized to the families of the soldiers and crew.

“Not before the trial, not during it, not after the sentence,” Yury Mysaygin, a popular Dnipro-based volunteer helping the army contemplates on his Facebook page. “It doesn’t matter if a civilian court is entitled to judge him. It’s not even a question. He is a participant of a tragedy that claimed 49 of our heroes. He must give apology at least.”