In russia, the prosecution has demanded a sentence of 4 years and 11 months in a corrective colony for the terrorist Igor Girkin, as russian media report.
Girkin (Strelkov) was detained and placed under arrest in July 2023. He was accused of publicly calling for extremist activities using media or the internet.
According to the investigation, the grounds for initiating the case were two publications by Girkin on Telegram, in which he endorsed the de-occupation of Crimea and commented on the non-payment to the military with the phrase: "Citizens, shooting for this is not enough".
As reported by OstroV, on April 12, 2014, Igor Girkin (Strelkov), along with a group of russian saboteurs, entered Sloviansk from the territory of russia. His sabotage group captured the city's police and SBU departments, and Girkin declared himself the "acting commander of the DNR militia". Later, he admitted that without his group, the bloody war in Ukraine would not have started. "The trigger of the war was still pressed by me. If our group hadn't crossed the border, everything would have ended up like in Kharkiv, like in Odesa. There would have been several dozen killed, burned, arrested. And that would have been the end of it. Our group set in motion the wheel of the war that is still ongoing", - the saboteur stated in an interview with the right-wing newspaper Zavtra. In August 2014, Girkin fell out of favor with russian curators and was "dismissed" from the position of "Minister of Defense of the DNR". On November 17, 2022, the International Court in The Hague found the militant guilty of the downing of the Malaysian Boeing MH17 in the sky over the Donetsk oblast and sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment.