The Russian authorities have arrested a prime navy colonel and charged him with large-scale fraud, the state news agency TASS reported on Thursday. The colonel was beforehand the commander of troops answerable for a 2022 bloodbath within the Ukrainian metropolis of Bucha.
The authorities arrested the colonel, Artyom Gorodilov, on July 3 and charged him with committing fraud amounting to no less than one million rubles ($11,236), TASS reported. A navy court docket ordered that he be held in pretrial detention till Aug. 19, and he faces as much as 10 years in jail if convicted, TASS reported. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Colonel Gorodilov is at the moment the commander of the 83rd Guards Air Assault Brigade, a unit based mostly within the Russian Far East, which is working in jap Ukraine. He beforehand led the 234th Guards Air Assault Regiment, based mostly within the Russian metropolis of Pskov.
An investigation by The New York Times in 2022 decided that members of the 234th Regiment had been behind a bloodbath of civilians on Yablunska Road in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, when it was occupied by Moscow’s troops within the early days of the warfare.
Colonel Gorodilov led the unit on the time and was current within the city the place lots of of civilians died, in some instances because of brutal executions, The Instances discovered. Russian troops retreated from the realm in early 2022.
The U.S. government imposed sanctions on Colonel Gorodilov final yr for what it known as “his involvement in gross violations of human rights, specifically extrajudicial killings.”
He was promoted to the rank of colonel days after photographs from Bucha emerged publicly and turned the suburb into a world image of the fear that Russian forces have delivered to occupied Ukrainian cities.
Moscow has denied involvement within the Bucha killings, with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia calling the occasions “a provocation.” The Instances, nonetheless, recognized two dozen members of the 234th Regiment who had been in Bucha on the time of the bloodbath, partly by tracing the numbers the troops known as in Russia utilizing the Ukrainian victims’ cell phones.