On Tuesday, the Lithuanian Supreme Court dismissed the cassation appeal of Oleksandr Radkevich, a Ukrainian citizen sentenced in absentia to prison in the January 13, 1991 Soviet crackdown case.
In its verdict which is final and not subject to further appeal, the Supreme Court ruled that the provisions of the law were correctly applied in sentencing the man.
"There is no legal basis to further mitigate the sentence," Judge Artūras Pažarskis said during the hearing.
The Prosecutor General's Office asked the court to uphold the sentence of one and a half years' imprisonment, while Radkevich sought to be released from criminal liability.
Radkevich, who formerly served in the Soviet army, is currently fighting in Ukraine against the Russian invasion and says that his military service prevented him from attending the trial in Lithuania.
Arvydas Verpečinskas, his defence lawyer, says that his client could not understand the reality of the January 1991 events due to the strong Soviet propaganda, but that it was clear that he might face liability for non-compliance with an order.
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Several years ago, the Vilnius Regional Court sentenced the man, who was 23 at that time, to four years in prison for driving a tank involved in the bloody January 13, 1991 events at the Lithuanian capital's Press House.
Fourteen people were killed and hundreds more were injured when the Soviet troops stormed the TV Tower and the Radio and Television Committee building in Vilnius in the early hours of January 13, 1991. Lithuania had declared independence from the USSR in March 1990.
In the autumn of 2021, Radkevich was detained in Greece on a European arrest warrant issued by the Lithuanian court. However, the Supreme Court of Greece ruled not to extradite the man to Lithuania and he was released.
The Lithuanian Court of Appeal last year reduced Radkevich's prison sentence from four to one and a half years.
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 – toward his sentence, meaning that he would have to serve slightly over a year in prison.
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