Ukraine announces first war crimes charge against a Russian soldier

Ukraine's top prosecutor disclosed plans Wednesday for the first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier, as fighting raged in the east and south and the Kremlin entertained the possibility of annexing a corner of the country it seized early in the invasion.

Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said her office charged Sgt. Vadin Shyshimarin, 21, in the killing of an unarmed 62-year-old civilian who was gunned down while riding a bicycle in February, four days into the war.

Shyshimarin, who served with a tank unit, was accused of firing through a car window on the man in the northeastern village of Chupakhivka. Venediktova said the soldier could get up to 15 years in prison. She did not say when the trial would start.

Venediktova's office has said it has been investigating more than 10,700 alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and has identified over 600 suspects.

In his Wednesday night video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the U.S. for a new $40 billion US aid package, part of which, he said, would go toward investigating war crimes by Russia.

He voiced confidence that Ukraine will "fully liberate our land and our people."

Many of the alleged atrocities came to light last month after Moscow's forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital, exposing mass graves and streets and yards strewn with bodies in towns such as Bucha. Residents told of killings, burnings, rape, torture and dismemberment.

On the economic front, Ukraine shut down a pipeline Wednesday that carries Russian natural gas to homes and industries in Western Europe, marking the first time since the start of the war that Kyiv disrupted the flow westward of one of Moscow's most lucrative exports.

But the immediate effect of the energy cutoff is likely to be limited, in part because Russia can divert the gas to another pipeline and because Europe relies on a variety of suppliers.

Meanwhile, a Kremlin-installed politician in the southern Kherson region, site of the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the war, said regional officials want Russian President Vladimir Putin to make Kherson a "proper region" of Russia — that is, annex it.

"The city of Kherson is Russia," Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kherson regional administration installed by Moscow, told Russia's RIA Novosti news agency. He said regional officials want Russian President Vladimir Putin to make Kherson a "proper region" of Russia.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that it would be "up to the residents of the Kherson region" to make such a request, and that any move to annex territory would would have to be closely evaluated by experts to make sure its legal basis is "absolutely clear."

Russia has repeatedly used annexation or recognition of breakaway republics as tactics in recent years to gain pieces of fellow former Soviet republics Ukraine and Georgia. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 after holding a referendum on the peninsula over whether it wanted to become part of Russia.

Kherson, a Black Sea port of roughly 300,000, provides access to fresh water for neighbouring Crimea and is seen as a gateway to wider Russian control over southern Ukraine. It was captured early in the war, becoming Ukraine's first major city to fall.