Anton Gerashchenko visited in Italy a National Guardsman who received 24 years for murder in Donbass
Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Anton Gerashchenko today met with Ukrainian National Guardsman Vitaly Markiv, sentenced in Italy to 24 years in prison for the murder of a photo reporter in the Donbass, and also published the full text of Markiv’s sentence in Ukrainian translation, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Gerashchenko wrote about this on his page on the social network.
“Today, on behalf of the Minister of Internal Affairs, I met with the Ukrainian prisoner of conscience – Vitaly Markiv. By the same National Guardsman, who was unfairly, under the pressure of propaganda hysteria, the Pavia court gave 24 years in prison,” Gerashchenko wrote.
According to him, despite 2 years and 4 months spent in captivity, Vitaly Markiv is cheerful and purposeful.
“He maintains his body and spirit with constant training. Reads a lot of books. What offends him most is not even that he spends his youth behind bars, but that the Italian court actually accused the Ukrainian people of defending their state from an insidious attack,” the deputy minister noted.
He noted that Vitaly conveyed “words of sincere gratitude to his fellow soldiers - the soldiers of the volunteer battalion of the NSU named after General Kulchitsky, as well as its voluntary defenders - volunteers in Ukraine, Italy and around the world.”
“He, like us, considers this trial not a legal act, but a purely political, PR and propaganda reprisal against a Ukrainian soldier,” Gerashchenko noted.
Another good news for the convicted militant, as the Deputy Minister noted, was that Ukrainian lawyer Alexander Chebanenko joined the defense team.
“The appeal against the absurd, unjust sentence and having nothing to do with reality will be filed on time. The case will be heard by the jury of appeal of the city of Milan,” Gerashchenko added.
Let us recall that in July 2019, an Italian court sentenced National Guardsman Vitaly Markiv to 24 years in prison for the murder of a photojournalist in Donbass.
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