With my fellow defendants, Shaun Pinner and Brahim Saadoune — all three of us soldiers in the Ukrainian army who’d been forced to surrender to the Russians — I stood in a cage along one wall of the Russian courtroom.It was show time. Our lawyers rocked up, but we had not been able to talk to them because real justice was not the point of the shadow game that was about to be staged.When the trial got going, it was hard to follow the translator and hard to keep up with all the jargon and all the sub-clauses. It was mercenary this and conspiracy that. Sometimes, a judge or a prosecutor would ask a question, but I was confused and didn’t understand the rules of the game. In particular, I didn’t understand the consequences of what I was admitting to.
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