What 29 July 2022 showed about wartime accountability

What did accountability for war crimes look like on 29 July 2022? That day offered two very different answers: a courtroom in Kyiv applying ordinary legal procedure, and a series of events on the ground that tested the idea that anyone would be held to account at all.

In Kyiv, a court reduced the sentence of Vadim Shishimarin, the first Russian soldier tried for war crimes, from life in prison to 15 years of detention. His defence attorney said it was highly likely that he would be returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange. As the background to the case records, Shishimarin had pleaded guilty on 18 May 2022 to fatally shooting an unarmed civilian, Oleksandr Shelipov, and was sentenced to life on 23 May. His lawyer appealed. Law professor Chris Jenks later suggested that the legal reasoning, conviction and sentencing appeared to be flawed.

The appeal ruling was a reminder that Ukraine's courts were handling wartime prosecutions through the normal appeal process, even as the fighting continued. It also left open a practical question raised by the defence lawyer himself: whether a sentence handed down in Kyiv would be served in full, given the possibility of an exchange.

A prison strike and rival accusations

The same day, Russia and the Donetsk People's Republic said that 53 people were killed and 75 others injured when shelling hit a prison holding Ukrainian prisoners of war in Olenivka, in Donetsk Oblast, a city under DPR control. Russia and Ukraine accused each other of carrying out the strike.

Later accounts described the building as part of a Russian-operated prison in Molodizhne near Olenivka, and said the prisoners were mainly soldiers of the Azov regiment who had defended the Azovstal complex in Mariupol. Those later accounts put the toll at 53 to 62 prisoners killed and 75 to 130 wounded, and described the shelling as a false flag operation by Russian forces. None of that was settled on 29 July 2022, when the competing accusations were the main public record.

A video and a vow

Also on 29 July 2022, a video emerged on social media that appeared to show a Russian soldier castrating a Ukrainian prisoner of war in the town of Sievierodonetsk, in Donetsk Oblast. The video had not been independently verified. The Ukrainian government voiced outrage and vowed retaliation against the perpetrators.

Civilians under fire

The violence reached civilians elsewhere. A Russian strike on a bus stop in Mykolaiv killed five civilians and injured seven others, according to regional governor Vitaliy Kim. It followed a run of strikes in preceding days: on 28 July, missiles hit Kropyvnytskyi, killing five people and injuring 25, while Russian shelling of Bakhmut with BM-27 Uragan rocket launchers killed three civilians and injured three more. Cruise missiles launched from the Black Sea also struck Bucha, Lyutizh and Vyshhorod in Kyiv Oblast, injuring at least fifteen people, including five civilians, according to Kyiv governor Oleksiy Kuleba.

The wider picture

The battlefield context was shifting. On 28 July, presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said an operation to recapture Kherson Oblast had started. On 27 July, Russia had captured the Vuhlehirska Power Station near Svitlodarsk, Ukraine's second largest power plant, and claimed to have destroyed more than 100 M142 HIMARS missiles in an airstrike on Dnipro. Russian forces in Belarus had also launched 25 ballistic missiles into northern Ukraine on 28 July.

Beyond Ukraine, the war's economic effects were being felt. Authorities in Hanover, Germany, turned off heating and switched to cold showers in public buildings, and shut off public fountains, after Gazprom reduced gas supplies to Germany through Nord Stream.

Taken together, 29 July 2022 set a lawful, methodical appeal in Kyiv against events whose responsibility was disputed or unverified. The contrast illustrated how much of wartime accountability depended on facts that could be established, and on who ultimately served the sentences handed down.