Deutsche Welle: The First Russian Top Officer Agrees To Testify At The Hague

What can a military intelligence colonel of the Russian MoD tell you about?

Former colonel of Military Intelligence of the Russian MoD (GRU), later senior instructor at the Wagner Group and one of the commanders of the Redut PMC, Igor Salikov, decided to testify about Russian war crimes in Ukraine at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Deutsche Welle reports.

He claims that he fought in Syria and Africa as part of the Wagner Group, and he was in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014, including being the head of the 4th Special Operations Department of the “DPR Prosecutor General’s Office.” In 2022, Salikov took part in a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, during which he commanded a unit of the Redut PMC.

According to him, he witnessed the crimes of the Russian army, in particular the “false flag operations” in the Donbas, “atrocities against civilians,” torture and executions of prisoners of war, and the forceful displacement of children who were “transported across the border to Belarus.”

The former Russian military man said that he left Russia with his family in June 2022. Now he has flown from Cape Town (South Africa) to the Netherlands, where he intends to seek political asylum. On December 10, Salikov wrote a confession addressed to ICC prosecutor Karim Khan and ICC President Piotr Hofmański, which he submitted through the Gulagu.net project.

The founder of the human rights project, Vladimir Osechkin, claims that he registered the document within the ICC system in Amsterdam.

At the same time, Osechkin appealed to the leadership of the ICC with a request for the protection of Salikov, who, since the summer of 2023, had been remotely testifying to prosecutors of the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine and was awaiting questioning by ICC investigators.

“Salikov does not count on immunity from criminal prosecution by the ICC and is ready to answer for complicity in aggression against Ukraine,” Osechkin said. Over the past six months, the former GRU colonel wrote the book “No War!” about the events of 2014–2015 and 2022. He is now writing a second book “Wagner: The Kremlin's Army”, to contribute to ending the war.