Russia puts Chechnya killers on trial

MOSCOW: Russia on Tuesday began hearing a case against two Ukrainians accused of murdering dozens of Russians during the Chechen war in the 1990s as part of a nationalist killing squad.
The powerful Investigative Committee said that the supreme court of Chechnya, the highest court in the region, has begun to hear the case against Stanislav Klykh and Mykola Karpyuk, both of whom have been in pre-trial detention for over a year on charges of murder and belonging to a militant organization.
Their defence calls the case politically motivated, and the main evidence that the two men participated in the Chechen conflict 20 years ago is reportedly the testimony of a convict serving a long sentence for armed robbery.
Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said that Karpyuk and Klykh were members of a Ukrainian nationalist group UNA-UNSO whose goals were “to oppose the Russian government in any form and eliminate Russian citizens of Russian ethnicity.”