Russian Investigative Committee opens criminal case over Gorlovka shelling by Ukraine

According to Russian investigators, on May 26 servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and National Guard carried out aimed artillery shelling of civil infrastructure facilities in Gorlovka.

Russia’s Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case over the shelling of the city of Gorlovka in the Donetsk Region in Ukraine’s embattled east by Ukrainian servicemen, Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said Thursday.

The Main Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee determined that the crime was punishable under Russian Criminal Code articles “Murder and attempted murder” and “Use of banned means and methods of war.”
According to Russian investigators, on May 26 at about 20:15, unidentified persons from among servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and National Guard, while fulfilling knowingly criminal orders from higher commanders and officials of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and National Guard, carried out aimed artillery shelling, from heavy armaments with the calibers of at least 122 millimeters having high incapacitating properties, of civil infrastructure facilities which are not military targets in the city of Gorlovka.

Residential buildings on Planyornaya and Ozeryanovskaya streets, as well as adjacent territory, got into the firing area. As a result, three people, including a girl born in 2004, were killed. Another two people, including a two-year-old child, were wounded.

“Investigators believe that the attackers pursued the goal to kill an ethnic group of Russian-speaking persons residing in Donbas. They were acting in violation of the protocol on termination of the use of arms in the southeast of Ukraine and a memorandum to it, as well as provisions of a number of international conventions, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child,” Markin said.

He said Russian laws allow the Investigative Committee, in line with part 3 of Article 12 of the Russian Criminal Code, to bring to criminal account foreign nationals who committed a crime beyond the borders of the Russian Federation if the crime is aimed against a Russian national, as well as in cases envisioned by an international treaty of the Russian Federation if the foreign nationals were not convicted in a foreign state.