National Guard Markiv sentenced to 24 years in prison in Italy

An Italian court found Vitaliy Markiv, an employee of the National Guard of Ukraine, guilty of the death of an Italian journalist Andrea Rockelli in 2014. He is sentenced to imprisonment for 24 years.

Censor.NET reports citing Hromadske. 

The prosecutor has demanded a massive 17-year sentence despite very real concerns about both the charges and the evidence provided to back them. 

29-year-old Markiv has dual Ukrainian and Italian citizenship, which made it easy to arrest him on 30 June 2017, when he arrived in Italy to visit his mother. He has been held in detention ever since, although the initial charge of murder was changed to the much more vague ‘involvement’ in Rocchelli’s death before the trial began.

It is by no means common for Ukrainian soldiers to also have Italian citizenship, so the odds against such a soldier also happening to be a person directly implicated in the death of Rocchelli on 17 May 2014 near Sloviansk seem rather high.

Markiv’s knowledge of Italian does, however, explain how he came to be known to Rocchelli, and also to another Italian journalist, Ilaria Morani, whose article on 25 May 2014, appears to have led to Markiv’s arrest. This wrongly identifies Markiv as a captain of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and quotes him as warning them to stay clear of the military zone. He supposedly goes on to say: "We don’t usually shoot in the direction of the city or civilians, however where we see movement, we load heavy artillery. This is what happened to the car with the journalists and the interpreter. We shoot from here within a kilometre and a half. There is no clearly delineated front here. It is not a war like Libya. There are actions scattered throughout the city, we await only the green light for the final attack "

Markiv himself did not have access to such artillery, and the actual recording of this telephone conversation was not kept. There were also discrepancies between the testimony of Morani and her colleague, Marcello Fauci, who had actually spoken with Markiv, as to when the telephone conversation took place, in which language and as to whether Rocchelli’s death had been mentioned.

It is not necessarily evident why this was supposed to be incriminating, especially as Markiv had positively tried to discourage Rocchelli and Mironov from entering a war zone, as had the Italian government. The Ukrainian Army was facing constant shelling and did need to defend themselves. Neither Rocchelli nor Mironov had official accreditation, and the taxi in which they were driving was not identified as being a press vehicle.

See more: Three mercenaries fighting in Donbas against Ukraine convicted in Italy. VIDEO&PHOTOS

The prosecution alleges that Markiv gave information to the Ukrainian Army about the presence in the area of Rocchelli and Mironov, and that their deaths were deliberate killing. Reports from the trial suggest that the prosecution often acts as though it is the Ukrainian authorities who are on trial and criticized for lack of progress in investigating the deaths.

During her address on 5 July, Rapetti stressed that Markiv’s duty as a soldier had been to inform his superiors if any suspicious individuals were approaching. The soldier had thus been carrying out orders and there had been nothing reprehensible in his behaviour. She pointed out that according to Italy’s military criminal code, you cannot punish a military serviceman for carrying out an order since, in wartime, a soldier must obey, not start discussing orders.

Speaking of the absurdity of the charges, she stressed that it wasn’t clear who had been responsible for the shooting on 24 May 2014, or where the shooting had been from. "Nobody deliberately wanted to kill the journalists. These people became victims of war, and in war they shoot against the enemy."