There’s a lot that is unclear about the fate of the three captured fighters – two of them British – who were sentenced to death in Donetsk on Thursday. Even the charges are obscure. All that’s obvious is that the authorities are trying to evade the Geneva conventions. It’s illegal to punish people simply for fighting, so Shaun Pinner, Aiden Aslin and Saaudun Brahim were charged with other crimes instead. They were accused of terrorism, mercenarism and attempting to topple the government. According to laws adopted unilaterally when Donetsk declared itself independent of Ukraine in 2014, that means they can now be shot by a firing squad.
What’s more, the “trial” in Donetsk sends out a deeply worrying message about the future: not just concerning the course of the war, or relations between Russia and the west, but the very international legal frameworks that the world has tried to uphold since 1945.
