The Kremlin’s chief spokesman advised NBC News on Monday that two American fighters who went lacking in Ukraine, Alex Drueke, 39, and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, 27, have been “soldiers of fortune,” and had been taken into custody. The spokesman additionally claimed that the 2 males weren’t protected by Geneva Conventions as prisoners of conflict.
In the primary feedback the Kremlin has made in regards to the two males, the spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, mentioned that they’d been concerned in shelling and firing on Russian forces and ought to be “held responsible for the crimes they have committed.” He mentioned they have been being held whereas their case was investigated.
The U.S. State Department launched an announcement urging Moscow and the authorities in Russian-occupied Ukraine to abide by worldwide regulation. “We call on the Russian government — as well as its proxies — to live up to their international obligations in their treatment of any individual, including those captured fighting in Ukraine,” the assertion from the State Department press workplace mentioned.
The households of the lads reported them lacking final week, and on Saturday the State Department described them as “reportedly captured by Russia’s military forces in Ukraine.” Both are U.S. army veterans who volunteered to struggle in Ukraine.
The two have been combating with a small group of international troopers and went lacking in motion when their platoon got here beneath heavy hearth in a village close to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest metropolis, which is about 25 miles from the Russian border.
Under the Geneva Conventions, prisoners of conflict have to be handled humanely and are protected against prosecution for collaborating in hostilities. The solely exception is prosecutions on conflict crimes fees.
But Mr. Peskov mentioned the lads weren’t half of the Ukrainian military and so weren’t entitled to Geneva Convention protections granted to combatants. Mr. Drueke is a former U.S. Army workers sergeant who served two excursions in Iraq, whereas Mr. Huynh is a former Marine.
The case of the 2 males has underlined the perils going through hundreds of international volunteers who’ve gone to struggle in Ukraine. Earlier this month, a courtroom in Russian-occupied jap Ukraine sentenced three international fighters to loss of life, accusing the lads, from Britain and Morocco, of being mercenaries who supposed to hold out terrorist acts. Legal consultants mentioned the trial and draconian sentences appeared calculated as a warning to international volunteers to not take up arms towards Russia.
The State Department mentioned on Saturday that it had reviewed pictures and movies on-line that appeared to indicate the 2 Americans, though it declined to touch upon the authenticity of the photographs or on the lads’s situations.
American officers have been involved with the lads’s households, the Ukrainian authorities and the International Committee of the Red Cross, a State Department spokesman mentioned.
On Friday, quick movies purporting to indicate the 2 males have been posted on YouTube during which they every mentioned in Russian, “I am against war.” It was unclear when the movies have been recorded or by whom.
Then the Russian state broadcaster RT mentioned it had interviewed the lads. The broadcaster reported that the 2 males had surrendered to Russian troops and have been at a detention heart managed by Russian-allied forces.
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