Vitaly Markiv
The Milan Court of Appeal fully acquitted Ukrainian Vitaly Markiv, accused of the 2014 murder of Italian reporter Andrea Rocchelli in Donbas. Lyudmila Denisova, the authorized representative of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine for human rights, reported this on Telegram.
She added that “justice has been done and the hero will return to his homeland” together with the delegation.
The defense managed to convince the court that Markiv did not commit this crime. In particular, the argument was that no proper investigation was carried out at the place of the murder of the journalist. In addition, the convict's lawyers noted that Italy has no legal right to judge Ukraine for war crimes, because the case in question does not have any signs of a crime against humanity and it was not committed in Italy.
Markiv himself stressed that neither the Ukrainian army nor the National Guard have ever fired at civilians in the Donbass.
Senior Sergeant Markiv, deputy platoon commander of the first operational battalion of the Kulchitsky National Guard, was detained on June 30, 2017 in Italy. He has citizenship of both Italy and Ukraine. He went to Kiev in 2013 to take part in protests on the Maidan, and later joined the volunteer battalion of the National Guard and went to fight in the Donbass. According to the investigation, Markiv commanded the Ukrainian military, from whose positions the mortar shelling was conducted. The main witness in this case was Rocchelli's French colleague, who managed to survive.
In 2019, an Italian court sentenced Markiv to 24 years in prison. Then the Ukrainian ambassador to Italy Yevgeny Perelygin called the trial “an operation of the Russian special services.”
Andrea Rochelli, a 31-year-old Italian, was known for his photo reports from the battlefield. In his works, he tried to reflect the suffering of the civilian population. In May 2014, he and accompanying Russian human rights activist Andrei Mironov were killed in a mortar attack near Sloviansk.
