Exclusive: Celebrated Ukrainian commander asks president to call for pardon for Alexander Garms-Rizzi
Photograph: Roman Kostenko
Kostenko is a deputy for the pro-European Golos party and chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s intelligence committee. He has written to Zelenskiy and asked him to raise Garms-Rizzi’s imprisonment with Downing Street. “I ask you to appeal to the leadership of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland with a request to consider the possibility of a pardon.”, the former UK prime minister, who had travelled to Kyiv for an international conference. The commander has tabled a motion in Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, urging Zelenskiy to act. A vote is likely to take place soon.
Garms-Rizzi is serving his sentence in a military detention centre. “The order not to go to Ukraine could not have been clearer. The order was there to protect British forces and the state from being dragged into the conflict,” the judge advocate general, Darren Reed, told him. Others have been killed. Samuel Newey, a 22-year-old from Solihull, died last month. A former Scots guard, 31-year-old Jordan Chadwick from Burnley in Lancashire, was found dead in water, with his hands bound behind his back. OtherThe tribunal in July heard that Garms-Rizzi was absent without leave for nearly six months. When his unit managed to contact him, the soldier, who lived in Russia until the age of 12 and had Ukrainian friends, admitted he had gone to join the war.