Finland sentences a Russian neo-nazi to life in prison for war crimes

The atrocities perpetrated by Russian invaders and pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine are beginning to receive judicial condemnation.

Russia sends neo-nazi sabotage group to 'strengthen' and spy on Finnish border
The alliance of pro-Russian communists and nazis fighting against Ukraine in Donbas

This Friday, it was announced that the Helsinki District Court has sentenced a well-known Russian neo-nazi, Voislav Torden, to life in prison. According to the Finnish media outlet yle.fi, the criminal was using the name Yan Petrovsky at the time of the events for which he was convicted. Torden was a member of the neo-nazi mercenary group DSHRG "Rusich", implicated in monstrous war crimes in Ukraine including the beheading of a Ukrainian soldier, exhibited by the Nazi group itself.

The aforementioned Finnish media outlet notes that at the time of the crimes for which he was convicted, Torden was the commander of a DSHRG "Rusich" group that participated in an armed attack against soldiers of the Aidar Battalion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine on September 5, 2014.

The court found it proven that Torden participated in the murder of a Ukrainian prisoner. Torden himself disseminated evidence of his crimes on social media. The Prosecutor's Office had sought life imprisonment for Torden for five war crimes. Ultimately, the District Court sentenced Torden to that sentence, although it dismissed one of the charges.

This is the first time a Russian war criminal has been convicted in Finland for crimes committed in connection with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which began in 2014 with Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and Moscow's support for pro-Russian armed separatist groups in eastern Ukraine. Torden's lawyer has announced that he will appeal the conviction to the Court of Appeals.

Torden was born on January 2, 1987, in Irkutsk, Russia. He moved to Norway in 2004 after his mother married a Norwegian. There, Torden set up a tattoo studio. In September 2010, Norwegian police found illegal weapons, military equipment, and forged documents in his studio. He spent a month under arrest and then returned to Russia.

He was part of the Russian Imperial Movement terrorist group and joined DSHRG "Rusich" in 2014, where he took part in the Russian mercenary group's armed activities in eastern Ukraine until the summer of 2015. Later, he participated with DSHRG "Rusich" in the Russian intervention in Syria in support of dictator Bashar al-Assad. In October 2016, Torcen was arrested in Tønesberg, Norway, after participating in marches of a neo-nazi group called "Soldiers of Odin". He was deported to Russia a few days later. Torden was arrested in Helsinki on July 20, 2023. In February 2024, he was convicted of illegally entering Finland.

As you may recall, in September 2024, Russia sent the DSHRG "Rusich" to spy on the Finnish border. Paradoxically, one of Putin's pretexts for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the "denazification" of the country. The Russian dictator deliberately omitted the fact that armed groups of Russian neo-nazis had been supporting pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine for years.

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Photo: The Moscow Times.