Nicholas Pearce

Saba Kevkhishvili lies on a hospital bed with his eyes swollen shut, ringed by dark purple bruises that bear the imprint of the violence he endured at the hands of those paid to protect him. “The policemen threw me into a minibus, where about six special forces guys started beating me mercilessly,” the 33-year-old real estate agent said.

The speaker of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, has been sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison in Ukraine, the State Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) reported on Thursday. During a trial held in absentia, Volodin was found guilty of violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity, with Ukrainian SBU investigators arguing that he had “directly participated” in preparing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The EU’s new High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Kaja Kallas has said that the billions of dollars in Russian state funds that have been frozen in the EU since the country’s invasion of Ukraine should be used to pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine, The Guardian reported on Thursday. Kallas said that Ukraine had a legitimate claim for compensation due to “all the damage that Russia has caused”, describing Moscow’s assets held in the EU as “a tool to pressure Russia”.