KYIV – The court’s verdict was unanimous and harsh: Ukraine’s top leaders, including President Petro Poroshenko, were guilty of war crimes. Their punishment: life imprisonment and the confiscation of their personal property.
But the sentence is highly unlikely to be seen – much less recognized – by most people and even less likely to be carried out, since this so-called court is a product of a Russia-backed separatist group in war-torn eastern Ukraine that calls itself the Luhansk People’s Republic. It’s known simply by its Russian acronym, the LNR, and is viewed as illegitimate by the vast majority of the world.
