An international tribunal on Saturday urged Russia to release “immediately” 24 Ukrainian sailors seized last November off the Crimea peninsula. “The Russian Federation must proceed…
An international tribunal on Saturday urged Russia to release “immediately” 24 Ukrainian sailors seized last November off the Crimea peninsula.
“The Russian Federation must proceed immediately to release the Ukrainian soldiers and allow them to return to the Ukraine,” said Judge Jin-Hyun Paik at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which is located in the German port city of Hamburg.
The tribunal judges additionally ruled Russia should “immediately” return the three Ukrainian navy vessels — Berdyansk, Yani Kapu and Nikopol — it seized in the Kerch Strait off Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014.
Ukraine took the matter to the tribunal last month — but Russia does not recognise its jurisdiction to rule in the affair and did not send representatives to the hearing.
“The continued denial of freedom to the Ukrainian sailors is worrying from a humanitarian point of view,” said Paik, heading a tribunal tasked with overseeing maritime disputes since 1982 and which 168 states recognise, Russia included.
