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A court in Russia has sentenced two Russian soldiers to life in prison for killing a family of nine after breaking into their home in occupied Ukraine, a rare legal case against atrocities committed by Moscow's soldiers in the war.
Anton Sopov and Stanislav Rau, two contract soldiers from the Russian Far East, were found guilty Friday of using guns equipped with silencers to murder the family because of "political, ideological, racial, national or religious hatred," Russian state news agencies reported.
The killings occurred in October 2023 in the Ukrainian town of Volnovakha, a logistics hub in southeastern Ukraine that Moscow's forces occupied shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion began more than 2 1/2 years ago.
The case was heard behind closed doors by a southern military court in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. Sopov, 21, and Rau, 28, pleaded not guilty and plan to appeal the verdict, according to Kommersant, a Russian business daily. During the war so far, people given such life sentences have not been allowed to avoid serving time in their high-security penal colonies by signing another contract to fight with Russia's army in Ukraine.
Since Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian officials, prosecutors and rights groups have repeatedly accused Russian forces of committing atrocities against civilians, including cases of torture, rape and executions.
Russian officials have denied such accusations, despite documented evidence and accounts collected by Ukrainian and international investigators. Moscow has also accused Kyiv of fabricating evidence to smear Russian forces.
But the murder of the nine family members caused uproar in Ukraine and beyond, because photographs of the bodies were quickly circulated on social networks, putting Russia under intense public pressure and prompting Russian investigators to open a criminal inquiry.
The victims were a married couple, Eduard Kapkanets, 53, and Tatiana Kapkanets, 51; their son Andrei, 31, and his wife, Natalia; as well as another son, Aleksandr, 25, his wife, Yekaterina, 27, their 9-year-old daughter, Anastasia, and 4-year-old son, Nikita; and Yekaterina's brother Dmitri, 20, Kommersant reported.