Two courts, two verdicts on prisoners of war
A look back at 6 November 2025, when courts in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk handed down sentences tied to the treatment of captured fighters.
What does justice for a prisoner of war look like when two rival court systems sit in judgment? On 6 November 2025, courts on either side of the front line delivered sentences that pointed in very different directions.
In Zaporizhzhia, a Ukrainian court found a Russian soldier guilty of killing a surrendered Ukrainian soldier in January 2024. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The ruling was marked as the first conviction of a Russian soldier for killing a captured Ukrainian since the war began. Ukrainian-language reports of the same day described the case as one in which a captured Russian soldier received a life term for an incident in the Zaporizhzhia region in 2024, involving a Ukrainian soldier who had surrendered.
The same day, a court in Russian-occupied Donetsk sentenced two Colombians to 13 years in prison for fighting with Ukraine's armed forces. They had been detained while travelling home through Venezuela and were transferred into Russian custody before the sentencing.
A wider pattern of allegations
The Zaporizhzhia verdict sits against a broader record. Russian forces and authorities have been accused of war crimes since the full-scale invasion of 2022, including attacks on civilian targets, hospitals and the energy grid, as well as the killing and torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war. A conviction for the killing of a surrendered soldier addressed one specific act within that category.
The war itself continued alongside the courtroom news. On 4 November 2025, a Russian strike on Synelnykove in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast killed one person and injured eight others.
Why the day matters
Taken together, the events of 6 November 2025 showed courts being used to adjudicate the fate of people captured or detained in the war. In one case, a court in Ukraine-controlled territory held a soldier responsible for killing someone who had given up. In the other, a court in occupied territory imposed a long prison term on foreign nationals for serving in Ukraine's forces.
For observers of Ukraine's public institutions, the Zaporizhzhia ruling was notable as a test of domestic courts handling war-crimes cases that involve captured soldiers.
