I have been privately assured by authoritative contacts in Russia that the two British soldiers captured by the army of the Donetsk Peoples Republic and sentenced to death by a Donetsk Court will not face the death penalty to which they have been sentenced.
For the time being their fate seems to be in the balance which serves the following purposes:
- they remain a bargaining chip for prisoner swaps – in particular perhaps for the Ukraine Opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk imprisoned by Zelensky’s henchmen
- they reduce the bellicose and ridiculous calls to “defeat Russia” by Truss and Johnson
- they are a warning to any British fighters who might be foolish enough to heed TRUSS’S call to go and fight for Ukraine.
When that call by Truss was made – for what would effectively be British mercenaries to go and fight for Zelensky it was immediately and rightly attacked by leading military and legal figures in the UK. Mercenaries are excluded from qualifying as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention and that was the basis of the Donetsk Court decision.
However both Shawn Pinner and Aidan Aslin joined the Ukrainian armed forces some years ago, before the Ukraine war started, they both have Ukrainian spouses and were of course bombarded by unceasing western propaganda and lies about the beginnings of the Ukraine conflict (that was some 20 years ago) when the country became a battering ram for NATO/EU aggression against Russia and a cause for the most fanatical neocon warmongers in Washington – uncritically adopted by the (at best naive) British Government.
There is in fact a British law, the Foreign Enlistment Act https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/33-34/90 of 1870 which prohibited military activity in aid of “any foreign state at war with any foreign state at peace with Her Majesty”. Truss called for Britons to fight for Ukraine against Russia with which country the UK is not at war
The Act made it a crime to prepare for or conduct military expeditions, or to aid or abet any violators of the act, or to induce a person’s enlistment by misrepresentations (the misrepresentation would be that we were at war with Russia!). Violation of the Act has a maximum prison sentence of 2 years.
Interviewed after the Ukraine war started on 24th February Truss said she would “absolutely” support Britons volunteering to fight for Ukraine. She was immediately criticised by the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, a former member of Truss’s Conservative Party who said that Britons who fought in Ukraine would be violating the 1870 Act.
And “aiding and abetting” them to do so would of course fall within the Act.
Truss was once a credible candidate to replace Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party but her hysterical attacks on Russia and her role in endangering the lives of Britons whom she sought illegally to encourage to fight in Ukraine have completely disqualified her. At least her political instability has been exposed before she could have caused even more damage as prime minister!
