War in Ukraine: death sentence that embarrasses Morocco

Syria of Bashar al-Assad and North Korea of ​​Kim Jong-un are the only two countries to have established diplomatic relations with the “republics” separatists of Donetsk and Louhansk, in the Ukrainian Donbass. We remember that the recognition by the Kremlin of “independence” of these two “republics”, on February 21, preceded by three days the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the alleged main demonstration of “sovereignty” on the part of the Ukrainian supporters of Russia, was, on June 9, the death sentence, by the Donetsk court, of three foreign “mercenaries”. The British Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner had gone to the Russian forces, two months earlier, with other fighters entrenched in the Azovstal factory, Bastion of resistance to Marioupol, until the fall of this city last May .

a passionate about Ukraine

The third sentence to death is a 21 -year -old Moroccan, Brahim Saadoun, who came in 2019 to kyiv to study aerospace engineering at the Polytechnic Institute. About 8,000 Moroccan students resided, at the start of the Russian invasion, in Ukraine, where they constituted, after India, the second community of foreign students. These Moroccan nationals then chose, in their overwhelming majority, to leave the country, in more or less chaotic conditions .

This was not the case of Brahim Saadoun who, according to his Ukrainian friends, was ” Fallen in love with Ukraine “and wanted to” return the same to this country which gave him so much “. These same friends say that Brahim Saadoun had committed himself in the fall of 2021 in the Ukrainian army. It is also under the uniform of the 36 e Marine infantry brigade that he would have been captured last April in Donbass, and not a month earlier as asserted in the Russian media at the time of his trial.

The Russian Ministry of Defense had prepared opinion at the Donetsk verdict by hammering, shortly before the judgment, that “the mercenaries who arrived in Ukraine are not combatants within the meaning of international law”. The president of the Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament, then supported the verdict rendered by the separatist authorities, adding that “ The death penalty is what these fascists (sic) deserve “. This triple death sentence has, on the other hand, been described as “war crime” by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, while the European Court of Human Rights enjoined Moscow to stay to the execution of Brahim Saadoun. In the United Kingdom, the capital punishment pronounced against Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner arouses all the more emotion than a third British prisoner, Paul Urey, died on July 10 in the hands of the separatists of Donetsk. London considers constantly that his two nationals are “prisoners of war”, installed in Ukraine since 2018 and officially engaged in the Ukrainian army.

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/Media reports.