Oleksandr Radkevich, a Ukrainian citizen convicted in absentia in the January 13, 1991, Soviet crackdown case, is asking the court to release him from criminal liability.
Radkevich, who previously served in the Soviet army, is currently fighting on the Ukrainian side against the Russian invasion. The man says his military service prevents him from attending the trial in Lithuania.
“He thinks that the offence is no longer dangerous,” Arvydas Verpecinskas, the government-appointed lawyer representing Radkevich in Lithuania, told BNS.
The lawyer said he has not had any direct contact with his client and previously communicated only with Radkevich’s lawyers from Kyiv.
A three-judge panel of the Lithuanian Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the Ukrainian citizen’s appeal on Wednesday.
Radkevich last year told the Lithuanian Court of Appeal that he acknowledged his guilt and asked to release him from criminal responsibility or at least commute his sentence.
However, the prosecutor Gintautas Paškevičius has asked the Supreme Court to uphold Radkevich's prison sentence.
“I request that the cassation appeal be rejected as there's no basis to uphold it on the stated grounds,” he told the court on Wednesday.
The Court of Appeal last November reduced Radkevich’s sentence from four years to one and a half years of imprisonment. Following the court’s verdict, the sentence became final.
The court counted the five months the Ukrainian man had spent in detention in Greece – from September 2021 to February 2022 – towards his sentence, meaning that he would have to serve a little over a year in prison.
Several years ago, Vilnius Regional Court sentenced Radkevich to four years in prison for driving a tank during the bloody January 13, 1991, events at the Lithuanian capital’s Press House. He was 23 at the time.
In the autumn of 2021, Radkevich was detained in Greece on a European arrest warrant issued by a Lithuanian court. However, the Supreme Court of Greece ruled not to extradite the man to Lithuania, and he was released.
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